[PS-1.1] The effects of language proficiency on word recognition in people with dyslexia

Elsherif, M. 1 , Wheeldon, L. . 1, 2 & Frisson, S. 1

1 University of Birmingham
2 University of Agder

According to the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (LQH), people with more precise lexical representations recognise words faster and more accurately than people with poorer quality lexical representations due to better discrimination between words. Research investigating the LQH has focused on the neurotypical population, with the assumption that people with dyslexia (PWD), which includes reading difficulties, would perform similarly to or worse than people with poorer quality lexical representations. However, there is no evidence to substantiate this claim. We tested 30 PWD with a masked form priming lexical decision task, along with individual difference measures that were inputted into a principal component analysis. In PWD, we found that for word targets from sparse neighbourhoods (e.g. FUNK), the facilitatory priming increased with an increase in the component of language proficiency and was only found when preceded by a pseudoword prime (e.g. FUNT). In contrast, for word targets from dense neighbourhoods (e.g. PEEK), the facilitatory priming decreased with an increase in the component of language proficiency and was only found when preceded by a word prime (e.g. FUND). These results will be compared with the control population. These findings highlight that PWD perform similarly to people with poorer quality lexical representations, supporting the LQH.