COGNITIVE FUNCTION IN LDs: BACKGROUND COGNITIVE FACTORS OF ENGLISH- AND JAPANESE-SPEAKING CHILDREN WITH LDs

Abstract

The present study aimed to review some representative findings on reading and writing (RDs) disorders in English- and Japanese-speaking children with LDs in relation to phonological awareness and verbal short term memory. Follow-up studies and studies comparing groups matched by reading age revealed that deficits in phonological awareness might causally relate to English language RDs. Importance of combined phonological awareness and verbal short term memory was indicated in tasks requiring a full phonological recoding strategy, as in nonword reading and nonword spelling tasks. Regarding verbal short term memory, effects of phonological similarity were not evident in 7 to 8-year-olds with RDs, but were evident in children above age 9. Results of studies on verbal rehearsal process indicated children with RDs showed both effects of phonological similarity and word length in the first to third item of a cumulative rehearsal process. However, this effect was not seen in the fifth and sixth items. It is inferred that children with English RDs might not be using phonological codes in the latter parts of a cumulative verbal rehearsal process. Results from studies on Japanese-speaking children with RDs showed that deficits in phonological awareness may relate to reading disorders of hiragana. Studies examining difficulties with kanji literacy found that malfunction in verbal short term memory might causally relate to occurrence of this difficulty. These findings indicate that deficits in phonological awareness may be a common contributing factor in both English and Japanese RDs, whereas malfunction in verbal short term memory appear to be relating differently to the RDs of each language.