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Memory for actions in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia

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Abstract

Around 5–10% of school children in China suffer from reading disabilities. Previous studies have shown that children with developmental dyslexia have deficits in encoding and retrieval information. Moreover, many studies have provided evidence that performing actions can promote the encoding and retrieval of memory compared to verbal tasks. Therefore, we expected that performing actions can improve the memory performance of children with developmental dyslexia. However, memory for actions of children with developmental dyslexia has not been sufficiently explored. The present study used a 2 (group: dyslexic or typical) × 2 (type of encoding: subject-performed task or verbal task) between-subjects design to examine whether subject-performed task could enhance the memory performance of children with developmental dyslexia. The results revealed that performing actions not only improves the memory performance of the typical group but also of the dyslexic group. We suggest that performing actions can improve the level of self-involvement during encoding and enhance item accessibility during retrieval of memory of children with dyslexia, thus compensating for the memory reduction caused by the deficits of rehearsal and retrieval strategies of children with dyslexia.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BK20170235) and Social Sciences and Humanities Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education (Grant No. 19YJC190010). The authors would like to thank Professor Baddeley for his generous advice during revision and thank Qi Sun and Jinrui Yang for invaluable help with data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education Science, Jiangsu Normal University, No. 101 Shanghai Street, Xuzhou, 221116, China

    Guangzheng Li, Qingling Yang, Huiyue Liu & Linxiang Jia

  2. School of Education Science, Xingyi Normal University for Nationalities, Xingyi, China

    Jing Yang

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  1. Guangzheng Li
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  2. Qingling Yang
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  3. Jing Yang
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  4. Huiyue Liu
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Correspondence to Guangzheng Li or Linxiang Jia.

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The procedure performed in the study involving human participants was in accordance with the ethical standards of the Ethnic Committee of Jiangsu Normal University.

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Li, G., Yang, Q., Yang, J. et al. Memory for actions in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia. Cogn Process 21, 427–433 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-019-00946-7

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