Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two studies are reported in which a group of adolescent children with dyslexia and a group of normal children matched for age and IQ undertook extended training. In Study 1, which comprised three phases of learning over an 18 month period, the children learned to navigate via key presses around a fixed circuit of a computer maze. It w a s concluded that, following extended training under these optimal conditions, the children with dyslexia had normal 'strength' of automatisation (as assessed by resistance to unlearning, by ease of releaming, and by dual task performance) but that their 'quality' of automatisation (as assessed by speed and accuracy) was impaired. Study 2 investigated the blending of two compatible simple reaction responses into a two choice reaction. Although performance on the simple reactions was equivalent across groups, the children with dyslexia had m o r e difficulty combining the two skills at firstand showed significantly less learning over the course of the training period. T h e estimated learning rate was around 5 0 % slower for the children with dyslexia, leading to the prediction that the proportionate slowing in acquisition time would increase as the square root of the normal acquisition time. A connectionist frameworic may provide a natural explanation of the phenomena.