Nigro, L. , Simpson, I. , Jiménez-Fernández, G. & Defior, S.
University of Granada
Individuals with dyslexia fail to automatize written patterns despite repeated exposure to print, which has led to the hypothesis of an underlying implicit learning (IL) deficit. This hypothesis has been widely investigated through visual non-linguistic tasks. We aimed at studying (for the first time) dyslexics´IL abilities to acquire regularities embedded in linguistic-based stimuli (i.e. C1VC2V). Participants with and without dyslexia were repeatedly exposed to pseudowords where either positional rules (Experiment 1) or contextual rules (Experiment 2) were embedded in the consonants. Following the exposure phase, IL was assessed through a forced-choice task. Results of Experiment 1 showed that dyslexic children (in contrast to controls) could identify previously seen items but could not transfer the positional ruIes to novel instances; despite this, no main effect of group was found. In Experiment 2, participants with dyslexia (in contrast to controls) were not able to recognise either previously encountered or novel stimuli; significant differences were found between the groups. A mixed ANOVA comparing results of both experiments revealed a main effect of group, suggesting the existence of an IL impairment in dyslexia. Thus, the present study indicates that dyslexic children cannot acquire linguistic regularities by means of exposure as typically-developing children do.