Visual non-linguistic and visual linguistic statistical learning in Chinese children with and without developmental dyslexia

Abstract

Purpose: There is increasing research showing that statistical learning (SL) is critically important to reading acquisition. However, the role of different types of SL tasks (i.e., domain-general SL and domain-specific SL) remains unclear. The present study addressed this issue by examining visual non-linguistic and visual linguistic SL in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia, chronologically age-matched controls and reading-level matched controls. Method: Three groups of Chinese children: 25 Grade 2 children with dyslexia (mean age= 7; 8), 25 Grade 2 chronological-age-matched controls (mean age= 7; 7), and 25 Grade 1 reading-level matched controls (mean age= 6; 9) participates in four experiments assessing visual non-linguistic SL, and visual linguistic SL of positional, phonetic and semantic regularities of an artificial logographic orthography. Results: Chinese children with dyslexia showed significant impairment in both visual non-linguistic SL and visual linguistic SL of phonetic regularities, compared with chronological-age matched controls. But no significant differences were found in SL of positional regularities and semantic regularities between three groups. Conclusions: Our results suggest that Chinese children with dyslexia showed both domain-general visual SL task and some domain-specific SL task (i.e., SL of phonetic regularities). Also, impaired SL is related to early reading deficiencies. These results underscore that SL is one of the potential mechanisms accounting for individual differences in Chinese word reading.