Deklarativt minne hos barn med dyslexi

Sammanfattning: Developmental dyslexia is a specific reading and spelling disability with several explanatory proposals. Previous research has shown that there is a strong relation between developmental dyslexia and difficulties in phonological processing, which has resulted in the theory that the cause of developmental dyslexia is a specific weakness in phonological awareness. However, such a specific weakness does not explain the non-linguistic difficulties that are also common in developmental dyslexia. According to the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH), several (both linguistic and non-linguistic) difficulties that are observed in developmental dyslexia can be explained by abnormal development of the procedural memory system. Moreover, this hypothesis implies that the declarative memory system remains intact and may have a compensatory role for the reading disabilities in developmental dyslexia. In this study, the aspect of declarative memory that is visual recognition memory after incidental encoding was examined. 10 children with diagnosed developmental dyslexia and 10 typically developed children participated in the study. The results indicated an intact declarative memory in children with developmental dyslexia. However, no significant correlation between declarative memory and reading ability was found. Thus, the prediction that declarative memory can serve a compensatory role in developmental dyslexia was not supported.