Inhibition of automatic semantic processing was examined in children who have high functioning-pervasive developmental disorders (HF-PDD) with or without reading di culty and in typically developing children. In Experiment 1, lexical decision tasks were conducted under three priming conditions: (1) normal character condition, (2) transposed-letter internal nonwords condition, and (3) transposed-letter external nonwords condition.e results indicated that all participants displayed semantic priming under the normal and transposed-letter internal nonwords condition, whereas semantic priming was not observed under the transposed-letter external nonwords condition. In Experiment 2, speed-reading was conducted under normal, transposed-letter internal nonwords, transposed-letter external nonwords condition, and nonword conditions. e results indicated that HF-PDD students with reading di culty showed low reading scores under the nonword condition. Moreover, their reading score under the transposed-letter internal nonwords condition declined more than that under the nonword condition. e above results indicate that students with HF-PDD and reading di culty have problems in conducting bottom-up processing while inhibiting top-down processing, when automatically generated semantic processing interferes with the processing conducted through the phonological route.
Working memory characteristics of students with reading difficulties were investigated using 4 types of n-back tasks with different stimuli. The participants, 14 ninth-grade students with reading diMculties and pervasive developmental disorders and 40 students with typical development, were required to judge whether a stimulus was identical to the one that had been shown n before. The results indicated that the students with reading di'fficulties did not have difliculty at n-0. However, they had difliculty at n=1, if both of the stimuli were numbers or hiragana and kabji characters that required linguistic processing, and with random figures that did not need linguistic processing. The present results suggest that students with reading difficulties may have problems with memory representations that are operated internally, Moreover, it is possible that these students have more fundamental problems, such as attention deficits, which may influence multiple modalities.
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