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Spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia: working memory and vocabulary effects
Author(s) -
Wiseheart Rebecca,
Altmann Lori J. P.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.1111/1460-6984.12353
Subject(s) - psychology , dyslexia , grammaticality , fluency , sentence , vocabulary , population , sentence processing , working memory , verb , cognitive psychology , linguistics , comprehension , cognition , reading (process) , grammar , medicine , mathematics education , philosophy , neuroscience , environmental health
Background Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. Aims To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group differences can be attributable to cognitive differences between groups. Methods & Procedures Fifty‐one college students with and without dyslexia were asked to produce sentences from stimuli comprising a verb and two nouns. Verb types varied in argument structure and morphological form and nouns varied in animacy. Outcome measures were precision (measured by fluency, grammaticality and completeness) and efficiency (measured by response times). Vocabulary and working memory tests were also administered and used as predictors of sentence production performance. Outcomes & Results Relative to non‐dyslexic peers, students with dyslexia responded significantly slower and produced sentences that were significantly less precise in terms of fluency, grammaticality and completeness. The primary predictors of precision and efficiency were working memory, which differed between groups, and vocabulary, which did not. Conclusions & Implications College students with dyslexia were significantly less facile and flexible on this spoken sentence‐production task than typical readers, which is consistent with previous studies of school‐age children with dyslexia. Group differences in performance were traced primarily to limited working memory, and were somewhat mitigated by strong vocabulary.