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Are RAN deficits in university students with dyslexia due to defective lexical access, impaired anchoring, or slow articulation?

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine different hypotheses in relation to RAN deficits in dyslexia. Thirty university students with dyslexia and 32 chronological-age controls were assessed on RAN Digits and Colors as well as on two versions of RAN Letters and Objects (one with five items repeated 16 times and one with 20 items repeated four times). In addition, participants were tested on discrete letter and object naming, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and speed of processing, and the RAN Letters and Objects total times were partitioned into pause times and articulation times. Results showed first that the dyslexia group was slower than the control group on all RAN tasks and the differences remained significant after controlling for discrete naming time. Second, both groups were slower in the large item set condition (20 × 4) than in the small set condition (5 × 16). Third, the dyslexia group was slower than the control group in both the pause and the articulation times. Although none of the processing skills was sufficient on its own to eliminate group differences in RAN Letters components, phonological awareness, and orthographic processing were sufficient on their own to eliminate group differences in the RAN Objects pause time. Taken together, our findings suggest that the deficits in RAN are not due to impaired anchoring, but rather due to subtle impairments in lexical access (specific to alphanumeric RAN), serial processing, and articulation.

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Notes

  1. However, in spite of their absolute difference, group differences could be accounted for by the same regression line regardless of set size.

  2. The performance of the participants who had a diagnosis of dyslexia on the screening measures was not significantly different from that of participants without such diagnosis.

  3. We adapted this test by replacing some easier items with more complex since our sample consisted of adults and by also adding seven items in which participants had to delete the middle sound in words.

  4. We selected these 40 objects from a total of 260 included in a Picture Naming task (Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980) because our previous studies with adults showed that these 40 objects could be named correctly by more than 90% of adults. The objects were black and white drawings.

  5. However, these absolute differences should be viewed with some caution.

  6. To extract the time to name the first row of stimuli we used GoldWave v4.26. The data can be provided upon request. Similar time differences between dyslexics and controls in the first row of stimuli have been reported by Amtmann, Abbott, and Berninger (2007).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Specialized Support and Disability Services Centre of the University of Alberta for their help in recruiting participants with dyslexia and Dr. Athanassios Protopapas for his constructive feedback on an earlier draft of our manuscript.

Funding

The study was supported by the Canadian Centre for Research in Literacy (CCRL) fellowship to the first author and by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant (#410-2008-0518) to the third author.

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Georgiou, G.K., Ghazyani, R. & Parrila, R. Are RAN deficits in university students with dyslexia due to defective lexical access, impaired anchoring, or slow articulation?. Ann. of Dyslexia 68, 85–103 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-018-0156-z

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