Story (re-)telling and reading in children with dyslexia : language or cognitive resource deficit

Dyslexia in children has been the subject of numerous studies in various disciplines related to neurocognitive sciences. The majority of the studies have been focused on phonological and metaphonological skills that considered essential prerequisites for mastering reading. Much less is known about grammatical and discourse characteristics in children with dyslexia; however, following the previous investigations (Westerveld & Gillon, 2008; Vandewalle et al., 2012), narrative skills in children with dyslexia seem to be much less developed in comparison to the typically-developing (TD) peers. According another hypothesis, the core limitations in dyslexics are caused by nonlinguistic factors, namely, by the cognitive resources deficit (Kibby et al. 2004; van der Schoot et al., 2000). For example, working memory resources deficit (especially, so-called phonological loop; see Baddeley, 1986) blocks reaching higher order cognitive processes, thus comprehension difficulties are more likely to occur (Savage, Lavers & Pillay, 2007). This should also be taken into consideration when discussing dyslexia. The present study aimed at experimental verification: does linguistic vs. cognitive resource deficit influence narrative production in dyslexics? During the experiment, children’s narrative comprehension and production were evaluated and compared from the perspective of story complexity, narrative mode (story telling vs. retelling), and order of session (1st vs. 2nd session). The key idea was that a prevalence of the cognitive resource deficit will cause lower results in the 2nd ordered session task, despite story complexity and mode. Vice versa, the pure linguistic deficit will be partially compensated by the priming effect (especially, if retelling is followed by telling), thus results of the 2nd session task will be higher than those of the 1st oneLituanistikos katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta