The Influence of Articulatory Suppression on Reading Among Chinese Children With Developmental Dyslexia: An Eye-Movement Study

Objective: The study aimed to examine how the phonological loop influences reading ability and processing in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD).Methods: This study included 30 children with DD and 37 children without DD. Two types of articles (i.e., scenery prose and narrative story) and two conditions (under the conditions of articulatory-suppression and silent reading) were applied. An eye-link II High-Speed Eye Tracker was used to track a series of eye-movement parameters. The data were analyzed by the linear Mixed-Effects model.Results: Compared with children without DD, Children with DD had lower reading achievement (RA), frequency of saccades (FS) and frequency of fixations (FF), longer reading time (RT) and average fixation duration (AFD), slower reading speed (RS), shorter average saccade amplitude (ASA) and fixation distance (FD), more number of fixations (NF), and number of saccades (NS). There were significant interactions between participant group and articulatory suppression on RT and FD. We also observed interaction effects between article types and articulatory suppression on RA, AFD, ASA, and FS.Conclusion: Children DD exhibit abnormal phonological loop and eye movements while reading. The role of articulatory suppression on reading varies with the presentation of DD and the article type.

Two Year Progression of Working Memory Impairments In Early Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis: Appraisal of Working Memory Profiles And Measurement Sensitivity

Working memory (WMem) impairments are a devastating symptom of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) that manifest as distinct profiles depending upon the type of impairment. It is unknown what WMem impairment profiles occur in early MS and how best to diagnose and measure their progression.88 participants (63 early relapsing-remitting MS, 25 healthy controls) were reviewed annually for two years (baseline, +1 year, +2 years) and completed five WMem tasks: oculomotor (OM) n-back-visual spatial sketchpad; digit-span forwards-phonological loop; California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT)-episodic buffer; digit-span backwards- central executive; symbol digit modalities test (SDMT)-cognitive processing speed. 65% of RRMS patients exhibited visual-spatial WMem impairments followed by 32% for episodic, 30% phonological loop, 24% central executive, 11% cognitive processing speed. These manifested alone (51%) or in combination (48%), with combined impairments the best marker of general WMem impairment. Significant progression in visual-spatial impairments was found for 24% of RRMS patients, with the OM n­-back maintaining sensitivity to general WMem impairment and progression. No other WMem subcomponent progressed or task maintained sensitivity. The results of this study provides crucial knowledge for the creation of interventions to treat WMem impairment in early RRMS, providing key targets for treatment and endpoints for determining efficacy.

Early visual deprivation does not prevent the emergence of basic numerical abilities in blind children.

Studies involving congenitally blind adults demonstrated that visual experience is not a mandatory prerequisite for the emergence of efficient numerical abilities. It remains however unknown whether blind adults developed lifelong strategies to compensate for the absence of foundations vision would provide in infancy. We therefore assessed basic numerical abilities in blind and sighted children of 6 to 13 years old. We also assessed verbal and spatial working memory abilities and their relationship with mental arithmetic in both groups. Blind children showed similar or better numerical abilities as compared to the sighted. Blind children also outperformed their sighted peers in every task assessing verbal working memory and demonstrated a similar spatial span. The correlation between arithmetic and the spatial sketchpad was affected by the group while the correlations between arithmetic and the other two components (the central executive and the phonological loop) were not affected by early visual experience. Our data suggest that early blindness does not impair the development of basic numerical competencies in children but influences the associations between arithmetic and some working memory components.

Memoria di lavoro, chunks e Lexical Approach: alcune possibili convergenze

Working memory is one of the most investigated topics in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology since it plays a key role in the architecture of cognitive human system. Reasoning, problem solving, and learning would be not possible without the contribution of working memory. Working memory is deeply involved in linguistic processes and in essential activities such as reading. Recent scientific research, especially in Anglo-Saxon context, has begun to investigate the role played by working memory not only in learning L1, but also in the acquisition processes of L2. Nevertheless, the overview of Italian language education still presents a lack of adequate literature on the important implications of the activity of working memory both for the theories of language learning and the practices of language teaching. This paper has the goal to identify some possible convergences between the working memory processes – especially of phonological loop and phonological memory – and the theoretical-practical system of Lexical Approach proposed by Lewis (1993; 1997). In this latter, specific attention is paid to the structure and learning of lexical chunks which are, according to Lewis, a fundamental element of the nature of lexicon and especially of collocations.

Sex differences in verbal forward digit span: A brief communication

The overarching role of working memory, its characteristics, and functions in our cognitive system is conspicuous. Nevertheless, sex differences in digit span as an index of the phonological loop - one of the main components of the working memory system - remain puzzling. In spite of numerous attempts, the previous studies yielded inconsistent results. The focus of this article was to study potential sex differences in verbal forward digit span. To this end, a sample of 120 young adults ranging from 16 to 25 years old from Persian population was measured and the memory span scores were analyzed using the classical method of comparing the mean score as well as the relatively new method of comparing the frequency of extreme performances. Similar to some previous studies, no significant difference was observed between males and females’ mean score. However, analyzing the frequency of extreme scores revealed that females were slightly overrepresented in the lower tail of the score distribution. Considering the evidence observed in the present study and other similar works, it is very likely that sex differences in performing memory strategies, but not in the true size of short term memory, are the underlying reasons of the observed differences. The theoretical implications and practical importance of these findings are broadly discussed.

Transparent number-naming system gives only limited advantage for preschooler's numerical development: Comparisons of Vietnamese and French-speaking children

Several cross-sectional studies have suggested that the transparency of the number-naming system of East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese) facilitates children's numerical development. The Vietnamese number-naming system also makes the base-10 system very explicit (eleven is "mười một," literally "ten-one," and thirty is "ba mươi," literally "three-ten"). In contrast, Western languages (English, French) include teen words (eleven to sixteen) and ten words (twenty to ninety) that make their counting systems less transparent. The main question addressed in this paper is: To what extent does a language's number-naming system impact preschoolers' numerical development? Our study participants comprised 104 Vietnamese and 104 French-speaking Belgian children between 3½ and 5½ years of age, as well as their parents. We tested the children on eight numerical tasks (counting, advanced counting, enumeration, Give-N, number-word comparison, collection comparison, addition, and approximate addition) and some general cognitive abilities (IQ and phonological loop by letter span). The parents completed a questionnaire on the frequency with which they stimulated their child's numeracy and literacy at home. The results indicated that Vietnamese children outperformed Belgian children only in counting. However, neither group differed in other symbolic or non-symbolic abilities, although Vietnamese parents tended to stimulate their child at home slightly more than Belgian parents. We concluded that the Vietnamese number-naming system's transparency led to faster acquisition of basic counting for preschoolers but did not support other more advanced numerical skills or non-symbolic numerical abilities. In addition, we extended the evidence that both transparent number-naming system and home numeracy influence young children's counting development.

Understanding the Role of Visualizations on Decision Making: A Study on Working Memory

The use of data visualization is increasing; however, there is little empirical explanation for how it supports users. Our goal in this paper is to deepen our understanding of the role of interactive visualizations in a particular context of decision making. Specifically, we attempt to understand the role of the working memory system, which is a concept to understand the mechanism of the processing and temporary storage of information in variety of cognitive tasks. We compared two interfaces, SimulSort and its non-visual counterpart Typical Sorting, with a multi-attribute decision-making problem. Because decision outcomes are known to be affected by the limitations of a person’s working memory, we conducted a crowdsourcing-based user study using SimulSort to understand how working memory, especially the phonological loop, can benefit from the using visualizations. We examined the impact on working memory with a well known dual-task methodology by designing a concurrent task to tap into the main decision-making task. The experiment was conducted with a total of 137 participants and an ordered logistic regression using a proportional odds model was applied to analyze the decision quality. The results supported the hypothesis that when using SimulSort, participants required less working memory than they required with Typical Sorting to accomplish the multi-attribute decision-making task even though SimulSort outperformed Typical Sorting in terms of decision quality. We also provide methodologies to conduct working memory studies by implementing an articulatory suppression task on crowdsourcing platforms in which experimenters have less control over the participants.