The relationship between cognitive control and lexical conflict resolution in developmental dyslexia

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have revealed that cognitive control functions contribute to the resolution of lexical interference. Both cognitive control (CC) deficits and reduced speed of lexical retrieval in Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) tasks are characteristics of Developmental Dyslexia (DD), but it is still not fully understood how these deficits relate to each other and to reading problems. To examine this question, we tested adolescents with DD (n = 38), poor readers (PR; n = 25) and typical readers (TR; n = 33) matched on age and IQ, on CC functions with Stroop, Stop Signal, Simon, Backward Digit Span and n-back tasks and on lexical retrieval and lexical conflict resolution with RAN of pictures in semantically homogeneous vs. mixed trials. As expected, in the blocked RAN Task DD individuals showed longer naming times and a greater effect of lexical conflict resolution (indexed by difference scores of naming times in the homogeneous and mixed conditions) than TR participants. We also found significant group differences (TR = PR > DD) in CC measures. Naming time was associated with CC, while the lexical interference effect did not show any association with this set of abilities. These findings suggest that DD individuals show impairments in multiple cognitive functions, such as cognitive control, lexical retrieval and lexical conflict resolution. Our results also suggest that CC functions are involved in lexical retrieval, but we have not found evidence for their involvement in lexical conflict resolution processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental dyslexia
• cognitive control
• rapid automatized naming
• lexical conflict resolution

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to our student participants and to the teachers, especially to Dóra Paveszka, Angelika Péntek, and László Tóth, who provided invaluable help in organizing the testing sessions. We are also grateful to Fruzsina Józsa, Dóra Eszter Szabó, Adrienn Oláh, Anita Lencsés, Fanni Takátsy, Lilla Csernátonyi, Edina Török, and Zsófia Miklós for their assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Lendület Research Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Lendület 96233 ‘Profiling learning mechanisms and learners: individual differences from impairments to excellence in statistical learning and in language acquisition’, PI: [Blinded for review]). [Blinded for review] was supported by the ÚNKP-20-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund. During the research and writing the manuscript [Blinded for review] was supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (PD18_128361) and ÚNKP-20-5 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities and Janos Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (ÚNKP-Bolyai+). [Blinded for review] was supported by funding from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01DC016977. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.