Feedback effects of literacy acquisition on short-term and working memory development : presentation of a PhD project

C. Demoulin a b c, R. Kolinsky a b c, J. Morais a b c

a Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS, Belgium b Unité de Recherche en Neurosciences Cognitives (UNESCOG), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium

c Centre de Recherche Cognition & Neurosciences (CRCN), ULB, Belgium contact: catherine.demoulin@ulb.ac.be

Research goals

• In children, there is a strong association between short-term and working memory capacities (STM, WM) and reading achievement, with the former considered as predictive of the latter1.

• Very few studies have investigated the inverse relationship, i.e. the potential effects of literacy acquisition on the development of STM/WM capacities. Yet, illiterate adults display poorer STM and WM capacities compared to matched literates2,3. This points to an interactive process with feedback effects from literacy on memory processes and/or representations.

To what extent and how does literacy acquisition affect short-term and working memory capacities ?

Summary

Learning to read puts strong pressure on STM and WM and could by feedback contribute to their development in terms of capacity, organization, and strategies. This in addition to the advantage of allowing a double representational code.

We will examine in normally reading children the ≠ potential mechanisms of such feedback effects. Indeed, literacy might :

1. improve serial order processing

2. improve executive control processes involved in WM tasks

3. help to develop less episodic, more abstract and more detailed phonological representations

4. improve chunking or other structuring processes

5. offer support from orthographic representations

References 1. Gathercole, S.E. and Baddeley, A.D. (1993). Eur J Psychol Educ, 8, 259-272. 2. Kosmidis, M.H., et al. (2011). Arch Clin Neuropsychol, 26 , 575-582. 3. Ardila, A., et al. (2010). Arch Clin Neuropsychol, 25, 689–712. 4. Majerus, S., et al. (2006). J Exp Child Psychol, 93, 95-119 5. Goldinger, S. D. et al. (1991). J Exp Psychol: Learn, Mem & Cogn, 17, 152-162. 6. Mueller, S.T. et al. (2003). J Exp Psychol: Learn, Mem & Cogn, 29, 1353-1380. 7. Cowan, N., et al. (2010). Dev Psychol, 46, 1119-1131. 8. Pattamadilok, C., et al. (2010). Lang & Speech, 53, 321-341. 9. Share, D.L. (1999). J Exp Child Psychol, 72, 95-129. 10. Maloney, E. et al. (2009). Quart J Exp Psychol, 62, 858-867.

Cut-off studies

Hypothesis and predictions: if literacy acquisition affects WM, we should observe better performance in some of its components among beginning readers than among children of similar age but still preliterate. In more advanced grade levels, we also expect a specific enhancement of verbal STM in good readers due to their richer orthographic knowledge in comparison to decoders of similar age.

Participants: children of similar age but ≠ reading levels (e.g., preliterate 3rd kindergarteners born at the beginning of the year vs. 1st graders born at the end of the year), and children of ≠ ages but same reading level (e.g., 1st graders born at the beginning vs. end of the year).

Study 1 will require attention to either order or item information, or to both, using either verbal or visual materials4.

Study 2 will examine the impact of literacy on the format of memory representations in terms of both phonological details and abstractness, using forward and backward oral span tasks on pseudo-words (PWs) with manipulation of talker variability and phonological similarity5,6.

Study 3 will distinguish between the possible impact of literacy on the development of chunk size vs. number of chunks hold in STM7.

Study 4 will address the beneficial impact of orthographic representations in the same way as in literate adults8, but with simpler verbal materials.

• In all studies, general intellectual level (PM47), vocabulary knowledge (EVIP), basic mathematics (TEDI-Math), decoding and word recognition abilities (BELEC), attentional & executive processes (listening span, KITAP) will be evaluated.

• Method of teaching reading and home literacy environment will be considered.

Training studies

Hypothesis and predictions: if orthographic knowledge benefits verbal STM, lists of PWs for which an orthographic representation has been created via a specific training procedure should lead to better recall than lists of auditorily-trained PWs. Thus, we predict better overall performance and order recall post- compared to pre-training, with a stronger effect for visually- than auditorily-trained PWs. We will check whether these effects hold only for the trained PWs or generalize to new PWs that include the trained (vs. untrained) graphemes.

Also, if literacy helps to develop less episodic, more abstract but more detailed phonological representations, we predict that variations in talker characteristics will affect recall less post- than pre-training, while the effect of phonological similarity may become more tied to fine-grained structures (e.g., nucleus and coda rather than whole rime) as orthographic representations are mastered.

Participants : 3rd and 4th graders.

Training situation: we will make children acquire new orthographic representations of PWs by asking them to read aloud and understand short texts containing several repetitions of novel (PW) targets (e.g., “Akunia”), a procedure after which target spellings are identified and produced more correctly, and named more quickly than alternate homophonic spellings (“Acunia”)9,10.

With this design, several studies will check whether training mainly impacts on order vs. item retention, phonological details and abstractness of representations, chunk size vs. number, or attention and executive processes, in manipulating, at both pre- and post-training, the variables of interest.

In all studies, in addition to verbal (oral) span tasks, pretest will include several measures of word reading, phonological recoding of PWs (including those used as targets in the training), and orthographic skills to account for initial individual differences.

Post-training, in addition to measures of orthographic learning (orthographic choice, written target PW naming, and target PW spelling) and of the word length effect, all children will be retested with the same verbal span tasks as in pretest.