The involvement of inhibition in reading development and dyslexia
(2023)
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- Literacy plays a fundamental role in one’s development, as it represents one of the essential tools to communicate with the outside world. However, the learning process of this skill is sometimes challenging and individual differences appear in children rapidly. Reading errors are frequent in the early stages of learning, including guessing errors, which are characterized by replacing a word with an orthographically close word. One of the processes that may explain these errors is inhibition, but this relationship has not yet been established. Indeed, inhibition has been linked to reading development but mainly to reading comprehension. The extent of the developmental relationship between reading and inhibition remains unclear in the current literature. Moreover, little is known about the involvement of inhibition within reading processes. Furthermore, while inhibition deficiencies have been highlighted in children with dyslexia, studies reported controversial results, probably due to methodological differences. Therefore, it is still unclear whether children with dyslexia face a general or specific inhibition deficit in reading. This doctoral research project's primary objective is to contribute to understanding the involvement of inhibition in reading development in children with and without dyslexia. Specifically, we aimed to study the interactions between inhibition and reading development through a longitudinal study assessing the developmental dynamic (Objective 1) and an intervention study evaluating the causal relationship between the two skills (Objective 2). Moreover, we wanted to provide new insights regarding the hypothesis of a domain-specific or domain-general deficit in inhibition in children with dyslexia (Objective 3). These objectives were addressed through five experimental studies conducted in samples of French-speaking children. Each experimental study assessed inhibition through different modalities (i.e., reading, oral, and motor tasks). Our findings confirm that inhibition is involved in reading tasks through lexical inhibition and contextual facilitation processes. Reading, spoken, and motor inhibition predicted the development of both word and text reading. Additionally, our results highlight a causal relationship between reading inhibition (trained with orthographic neighbors) and reading at both word and text levels, but also between spoken inhibition (trained with phonological neighbors) and word reading. Regarding children with dyslexia, our results provided strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis of a domain-specific inhibition deficit in reading. These inhibition deficiencies have also been linked to guessing errors, which we observed to be more frequent in children with reading difficulties compared to typically developing children. Finally, by providing a better understanding of the relationship between inhibition and reading, these findings have determinant practical and educational implications.
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De Rom, M. (2023). The involvement of inhibition in reading development and dyslexia. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/102394