Comparing cognitive performance in illiterate and literate children

Matute, Esmeralda; Montiel, Teresita; Pinto, Noemí; Rosselli, Mónica; Ardila, Alfredo; Zarabozo, Daniel

doi:10.1007/s11159-012-9273-9

Cited by 27 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…On the contrary, within the same grade, children's age (older vs. younger first grade) did not affect memory performance. Similarly, compared to their literate counterparts, illiterate unschooled Mexican children aged 6-13 years showed weaker performance in all cognitive domains, including digit forward and backward tasks (Matute et al, 2012). Weak memory performance in forward and backward digit spans as well as backward spatial span has also been observed in illiterate unschooled adults, whereas the forward spatial span appeared less affected (Silva, Faísca, Ingvar, Petersson, & Reis, 2012).…”

Section: The Role Of Literacy On Wm and Its Verbal Short-term Componentmentioning

confidence: 80%

Does learning to read shape verbal working memory?

Demoulin

Kolinsky

2015

Psychon Bull Rev

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Many experimental studies have investigated the relationship between the acquisition of reading and working memory in a unidirectional way, attempting to determine to what extent individual differences in working memory can predict reading achievement. In contrast, very little attention has been dedicated to the converse possibility that learning to read shapes the development of verbal memory processes. In this paper, we present available evidence that advocates a more prominent role for reading acquisition on verbal working memory and then discuss the potential mechanisms of such literacy effects. First, the early decoding activities might bolster the development of subvocal rehearsal, which, in turn, would enhance serial order performance in immediate memory tasks. In addition, learning to read and write in an alphabetical system allows the emergence of phonemic awareness and finely tuned phonological representations, as well as of orthographic representations. This could improve the quality, strength, and precision of lexical representations, and hence offer better support for the temporary encoding of memory items and/or for their retrieval.

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Section: The Role Of Literacy On Wm and Its Verbal Short-term Componentmentioning

confidence: 80%

Does learning to read shape verbal working memory?

Demoulin

Kolinsky

2015

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…Among the various measures of fluency performance, the number of words generated obviously depends on content knowledge, and several studies showed indeed that people having no formal education (in all studies, illiterate unschooled adults) provide far less responses than formally educated people in semantic fluency tasks [8,10,17,23,48,50,62] (see [34] for similar results on unschooled vs. age-matched schooled children). Although both the ecological or cultural relevance of the chosen semantic criteria and the level of reference to concrete knowledge and specific situations modulate performance [17,51,57,56], an impact of formal education has been reported even in an ecologically relevant, concrete version of the task [62], when participants were asked to name things or food items that can be bought at the supermarket.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

How formal education and literacy impact on the content and structure of semantic categories

Kolinsky

Monteiro-Plantin

Mengarda

et al. 2014

Trends in Neuroscience and Education

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a b s t r a c tWe examined the hypothesis that formal education and literacy impact the richness and precision of semantic knowledge but not the organization of semantic categories and basic mechanisms of access to them.In Experiment 1, adults of varying levels of formal education were presented with semantic fluency tests and a superordinate naming task. Experiment 2 examined the impact of reading proficiency on adults of varying degrees of literacy. They were presented with simple semantic, alternating semantic and phonemic fluency tasks, as well as with literacy-related, reasoning and memory tests.Fluency was analyzed in terms of overall performance, sequential order and speed of responses. Despite lower performance, illiterates and adults with null or limited formal education displayed taxonomic clustering and retrieval by semantic subcategory, as did participants with higher formal education levels. Yet, formal education and literacy slightly speed up access to categories, probably providing useful cues for generating category exemplars.

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“…Findings revealed that illiterates generally performed more poorly than literates on memory tasks, such as non-word repetition [ 42 , 43 ], verbal paired associates [ 44 , 45 ], digits backwards [ 44 ] and complex figure drawing [ 46 ]. Although still few in number, findings on children [ 47 ] confirmed that, after controlling for CA, socio-economic status and associated learning disabilities, illiterates performed worse than literate in several tasks, including verbal and visual memory coding, and delayed recall. Therefore, comparisons between illiterates and literates could be partially interpreted in terms of differences in reading experience, as illiterates have never been taught to read, thus part of neurocognitive processes strictly related to reading has not been developed as well.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory Deficits in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: A Reading-Level and Chronological-Age Matched Design

et al. 2021

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Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is considered a multifactorial deficit. Among the neurocognitive impairments identified in DD, it has been found that memory plays a particularly important role in reading and learning. The present study aims to investigate whether short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) deficits could be related to poor reading experience or could be causal factors in DD. To verify that memory deficits in DD did not simply reflect differences in reading experience, 16 children with DD were not only compared to 16 chronological age-matched children (CA) but also to 16 reading level-matched children (RL) in verbal, visual-object, and visual-spatial STM and LTM tasks. Children with DD performed as well as RL, but worse than CA in all STM tasks. Considering LTM, the three groups did not differ in Visual-Object and Visual-Spatial Learning tasks. In the Verbal LTM task, DD recalled significantly fewer words than CA but not RL, while CA and RL showed a similar performance. The present results suggest that when reading experience was equated, children with DD and typical readers did not differ in STM and LTM, especially in the verbal modality, weakening claims that memory has a causal effect in reading impairments.

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Comparing cognitive performance in illiterate and literate children

Cited by 27 publications

References 28 publications

Does learning to read shape verbal working memory?

Does learning to read shape verbal working memory?

How formal education and literacy impact on the content and structure of semantic categories

Memory Deficits in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: A Reading-Level and Chronological-Age Matched Design

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