Semantic, phonological/graphemic, and combinatorial priming in children with reading disability

Children with reading disability (RD) show deficits in listening, as well as reading, comprehension, suggesting impairments beyond word decoding. This dissertation explores one potential source of these comprehension deficits by examining lexical priming, a component of both word recognition and comprehension.; We examined semantic (e.g., SHIP-BOAT), phonological/graphemic (e.g., GOAT-BOAT), and combined (e.g., FLOAT-BOAT) priming, in both a visual and an auditory lexical decision task. We examined semantic priming because it is a key component of comprehension, and semantic priming deficits could contribute to problems in comprehension. Since children with RD are known to have explicit phonological processing deficits, we examined phonological/graphemic priming as an implicit measure of this processing. We included the combined condition as a replication of the semantic and phonological/graphemic conditions. Participants were children ages 8--16. 48 RD and 48 non-RD chronological-age matched (NRD-CA) controls participated in the visual lexical decision task; prime and target stimuli were presented visually on a computer screen, and subjects decided if the stimuli were words or not. Subjects matched on age and reading ability also participated in an auditory task, where subjects heard the auditory stimuli through headphones.; In the visual task, children with RD show significant priming in all conditions. In the auditory task, children with RD show significant phonological and combined priming, however they do not show significant semantic priming. There is a trend for children with RD to show less priming overall than the children without RD. Despite their disability, the children with RD show just as much phonological priming as controls in the auditory task, and only a pattern for less phonological/graphemic priming in the visual task. However, there is a pattern for children with RD to show less semantic priming than controls, and the children with RD do not show greater priming in the combined condition than in the phonological/graphemic condition alone, suggesting they are not getting any additional benefit from the semantic relatedness in the combined primes. These results suggest a deficit in semantic priming in children with RD. These priming deficits could contribute to the comprehension deficits seen in children with RD.