Working Memory and Dyslexia

Recent research has demonstrated that dyslexic children suffer impairments in both phonological skills and in working memory performance. In principle either a phonological deficit or a working memory deficit could underlie both sets of symptoms. This issue was addressed via a series of experiments designed to explore the relationships between dyslexia, age, phonological performance and working memory. Two groups of dyslexic children participated, with mean ages 15 and 11 years respectively, together with three groups of non-dyslexic children (mean ages 15, 11 and 8 years) matched for IQ with the dyslexic children and selected so as to provide both chronological and reading age controls for the two dyslexic groups. The performance of the older dyslexics across the range of tasks was slightly but not significantly worse than their chronological age controls and indistinguishable from that of their reading age controls. By contrast, the performance of the younger dyslexics was significan..