Paired Associate Learning Tasks and their Contribution to Reading Skills

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Associative learning is a non-linguistic process implicated in reading acquisition.
• Its independent contribution versus indirect influence via linguistic skills (phonological awareness, memory) remains unclear.
• Children with reading difficulties often show lower performance on associative learning tasks, such as paired-associate learning (PAL).

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the distinct associations of two verbal-visual PAL tasks with reading skills in children at risk for reading disabilities.
• To determine if associative learning is an independent predictor of reading performance or mediated by other linguistic skills.
• To compare the predictive power of the Bala Bbala Graphogame (BBG) and a Foreign Language Learning Task (FLLT) on reading abilities.

Main Methods:

• The study involved 110 children (ages 7-18) in rural Zambia, including those at risk for reading disabilities and typically developing peers.
• Two verbal-visual paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks (BBG and FLLT) were administered.
• Multivariate analyses of covariance (MANCOVA), repeated-measures ANCOVA, and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze reading performance and learning across tasks, controlling for phonological awareness, naming speed, and memory span.

Main Results:

• Children at risk for reading difficulties exhibited lower performance on both BBG and FLLT PAL tasks compared to typical readers.
• The BBG task significantly predicted both word reading and pseudo-word decoding.
• The FLLT task predicted word reading, and its performance partially mediated the relationship between phonological awareness and word reading.

Conclusions:

• Associative learning demonstrates partial independence from other reading-related skills, such as phonological awareness.
• The specific contribution of associative learning to reading acquisition varies depending on the nature of the paired-associate learning task used.
• These findings highlight the nuanced role of non-linguistic associative learning processes in the development of reading skills.