Does a socio-evaluative context modulate the amplitude of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia?

International audienceCross-linguistic studies suggest that phonological deficittends to be a universal marker of reading difficulties in developmental dyslexia (DD). However, there is a debate between the degraded phonological representation hypothesis and the hypothesis that the phonological deficit stemsfrom difficulties in memorizing, accessing and retrievingthe phonological representations. Our aim was to determine to what extent a socio-evaluative context modulatesthe amplitude and the expression of this phonological deficit. We designed tasks that involved the use of phonological syllables in silent reading by jointly manipulating theevaluative pressure of the instructions to saturate the phonological loop of the working memory (known to be impaired in DD). Our results showed that stressful instructions given on the importance to succeed in a reading taskimpact negatively both the performance and the phonological response patterns of children with DD, more thantypically-developing children, suggesting failure to accessphonological syllable-based representations under socioevaluative contexts