Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A growing body of research suggests that individuals withdevelopmental dyslexia perform below typical readers onnon-linguistic cognitive tasks involving the learning andencoding of statistical-sequential patterns. However, theneural mechanisms underlying such a deficit have not beenwell examined. The aim of the present study was toinvestigate the ERP correlates of sequence processing in asample of children diagnosed with dyslexia using aprobabilistic visual serial learning paradigm. The behavioralresults revealed that whereas age-matched typicallydeveloping children (n=12) showed learning in the task asreflected by their response times, the children with dyslexia(n=8) likely showed difficulty in learning. In conjunction withthese behavioral results, the ERPs of the typically developingchildren showed a P300-like response indicative of thisparadigm (Jost et al., 2015); whereas, the children diagnosedwith a reading disorder showed no such ERP effects. Thesefindings are consistent with the idea that differences instatistical-sequential learning ability might underlie thereading deficits observed in developmental dyslexia.