Language Learning in Dyslexia: Encoding and Offline Consolidation
Year: 2025
Type: other
Abstract: Dyslexia is a persistent learning difficulty, characterised by slow and inaccurate reading, with a prevalence of ~7% (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), 2013). Individuals with dyslexia are also characterised by reduced working memory (Snowling et al., 1986), and a reduced benefit of stimuli regularities (Ahissar, 2007; Tallal Paula, 1980), including in language (Ben-Zion et al., 2023; Henderson & Warmington, 2017; Kimel & Ahissar, 2019). A recent review (Solbi & Earle, 2024) on memory consolidation during sleep in dyslexia has suggested that sleep is less effective for memory consolidation in children with dyslexia and has highlighted the need for further research. Some deviations in sleep architecture have been documented for children with dyslexia (Smith et al., 2016) and with a developmental language disorder (Dlouha et al., 2020). One of the studied metrics was sleep spindles: bursts of neural oscillatory activity in the sigma frequency band (~11-16 Hz) during non-REM sleep that have been found to be positively associated with performance in learning tasks, such as learning novel words (e.g., Tamminen et al., 2010). Spindle prevalence has been found to be larger among children with dyslexia (Bruni et al., 2009; though see Smith., 2018) and the association of spindles with the retention of new memories follows a different pattern than that of controls (Smith et al., 2018; Reda et al., 2021). Our recent paper studied the associations of sleep metrics and vocabulary and grammar learning in typical adult readers (Kimel et al., 2025). We reported that SWS duration (after controlling for Total Sleep Time) was positively associated with the change in accuracy for vocabulary across the first night after training, and that sleep spindle density was associated with less forgetting across the longer-term for infrequently presented items. Taken together with a recent report on reduced offline consolidation among adults with dyslexia (Ben-Zion et al., 2023), this highlights the need for a study in dyslexia utilizing EEG-based sleep metrics. We have now collected data with the same experimental paradigm for a group (N = 22) of young adults with dyslexia and on this data we will test whether slow-wave sleep duration, and fast spindle density are associated with vocabulary acquisition and regularity extraction in language, and whether the pattern of associations is similar to that of controls.
Source: Open Science Framework
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7117377569