Sasson, A. 1, 2 , Cohen, H. 1 , Kahta, S. 1 & Schiff, R. 1
1 Bar Ilan University
2 Tel Aviv University
We investigated the effect of linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli on SL transfer ability. Participants included 28 adults with dyslexia and 31 TD adults. In two experiments, participants learned an AGL system and were tested on a variant task. In Experiment 1, participants were trained with letter strings and them tested on strings that used a different letter set. In Experiment 2, participants were pre-trained with shapes and then tested on items that utilized other shapes. Results show that in both experiments, utilization of pre-trained instances was much greater for TD participants than for dyslexic adults. The manipulations of stimuli had little differential influence on the performance of the dyslexics. Individual level analysis nonetheless indicated that few dyslexics were able to complete the linguistic transfer task, and that about half of the TD participant performed above chance in the two experiments. A comparison between the experiments suggests that being trained and tested on a linguistic task leads to better performance than a non-linguistic task only in the TD group. These findings imply that failure to learn the deep structure of input exemplars during training may be a primary source of the deficits in the transfer of implicit learning across task situations.