Statistical learning account of Chinese orthographic learning in Chinese children with and without dyslexia

Abstract

Purpose: Statistical learning is fundamentally important to oral language acquisition. However, the potential role of statistical learning in orthographic learning difficulties that are exhibited in children with developmental dyslexia has not yet been explored. In this study, we examined for the first time statistical learning of the three key aspects of Chinese orthographic regularities (i.e., positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities) in Chinese children with dyslexia

Method: Three groups of Chinese children (children with dyslexia (mean age 10.8 years), age-matched controls and reading-level matched controls (mean age 8.53 years) completed three artificial orthographic learning experiments that assessed learning of positional, phonetic and semantic information of unlearned novel characters.

Results: All three groups of children exhibited significant learning of positional regularities, phonetic regularities and semantic regularities of novel characters. Children with dyslexia showed statistical learning that was comparable with age-matched control and reading-level matched children when learning positional and phonetic regularities, but their performance on learning semantic regularities was significantly worse than that of age-matched controls.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that statistical learning is a potential mechanism that underlies Chinese orthographic learning, and that children with dyslexia have challenges in some, but not all, statistical learning tasks. In accordance with these findings, we proposed a statistical learning account of orthographic learning that incorporates language-general and language-specific constraints of statistical learning of a novel orthography.