Semantic and Phonological Priming in Children with Learning Disability: Word reading task

Abstract

The purpose of the present investigation is to examine visual and auditory cross modal pattern processing at the lexical linguistic level. The study also aims at exploring the nature and level of breakdown in lexical processing in dyslexia due to the inte1fering primes resulting in lexical retrieval problems. Participants were 7 normal children age-matched to 7 children with learning disability (LD), ranging in age from 8; 0 to 15; 0(years; months). Procedures involved a computer-assisted word-naming task during which each participant was presented the same set of 30 words in each of the three different conditions: (a) no-prime condition in which no auditory stimulus was presented before word display; (b) related-prime condition in which a word, semantically related to the target word, was presented auditory 500 ms before word display; and ( c) unrelated prime condition in which a semantically unrelated word was presented auditory 500 ms before word display. Results showed that children with LD performed poorly compared to the normal children on all the semantic and phonological priming tasks although larger semantic priming effects were seen in normal children as well as children with LD. The reaction time (RT) experiment showed that children with LD had longer RTs compared to normal children on all the three conditions and in both the tasks.