A Profile of Working Memory Ability in Poor Readers

Mediators of working memory and reading in a sample of children with reading difficulty: The roles of phonemic awareness and rapid automatized naming

Working memory (WM) has been consistently linked to reading. However, the mechanism(s) linking WM to reading remain unclear. WM may indirectly exert an effect onto reading through mediators such as phonemic awareness (PA) and/or rapid automatized naming (RAN). In a sample of children with reading difficulty (n = 117), separate mediation analyses tested direct and indirect (through PA and RAN) effects of WM on untimed word decoding and recognition (i.e., basic reading skills) and timed word decoding and recognition (i.e., reading fluency). WM exerted a direct effect on basic reading skills and reading fluency. For basic reading skills, there was a significant indirect effect of WM on reading through the mediation of PA (but not through RAN). By contrast, for reading fluency, there was a significant indirect effect of WM on reading through the mediation of RAN (but not through PA). Findings reinforce the importance of WM, PA, and RAN for broad reading skills, while offering a mechanistic explanation for why poor PA and/or RAN may differentially lead to reading difficulty.

Specific effects of working memory training on the reading skills of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia

Most research on working memory (WM) training for children with developmental dyslexia (DD) has focused on western alphabetical languages. Moreover, most of these studies used a combination of training tasks targeting a variety of WM components, making it difficult to determine whether WM training generates a general improvement in overall reading, or improves specific cognitive skills corresponding to the WM components that are targeted in training. We tested the general and specific effects of WM training on the reading skills of 45 Chinese children with DD, grades 3 to 5. In Experiment 1, the experimental group received a program targeting the verbal WM component; in Experiment 2, the experimental group was trained with a program targeting visuospatial WM. In both experiments the control group played a placebo video game. In Experiment 1, the experimental group outperformed the control group on the visual rhyming task, which is highly correlated with verbal WM. In Experiment 2, the experimental group outperformed the control group on the orthographic awareness test, which is highly correlated with visuospatial WM. Furthermore, in both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, the experimental groups outperformed the control groups on the fast word naming test, which is highly related to both visuospatial WM and verbal WM. Results indicated that WM training improved specific reading-related cognitive skills that are highly correlated with the specific WM components that were the target of training.