Schedule of Events | Symposia

Cognitive Profile of Chinese Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Suei Cheng Wong¹ (scrystal.wong@polyu.edu.hk), Allen Ming Yan Cheong¹, Henry Ho-Lung Chan¹, Duo Liu², Tsz Wing Leung¹; ¹School of Optometry, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, ²Department of Special Education and Counselling, The Education University of Hong Kong

Developmental dyslexia (DD) has been more extensively studied in alphabetic languages, but less is understood in Chinese – a logographic writing system. This study aims to characterize the cognitive profile of Chinese children with DD. We hypothesized that Chinese-speaking children with DD would exhibit deficits in working memory and the M-D pathway, impacting visual attention and motion perception.Forty-nine children with DD (9.02±1.76 years) and 50 age-matched typically developing (TD) controls ( 9.15±1.80 years) were recruited. Working memory was assessed with the reverse digit span test. Visual attention span (VAS) was evaluated under cue-first and retro-cue conditions. Coherent motion perception was assessed using a random dot kinematogram. Group differences were analyzed using ANCOVA with age as a covariate. Children with DD exhibit significant deficits in working memory by 28.5% (p < 0.001) and retro-cue VAS by 6.2% (p < 0.001) compared to TD controls. Age significantly affected performance on both tasks (p<0.001), but there were no significant group-by-age interactions (p>0.20). No significant group differences (p=0.23) or group-by-age interactions (p=0.29) were observed for coherent motion perception, although age had a significant effect (p=0.02). Chinese DD is characterized by impairments in working memory and visual attention. While no significant coherent motion deficit was observed, suggesting the M-D pathway may not be primarily impaired, the observed working memory and visual attention deficits warrant further investigation into the interplay between these cognitive functions and the M-D pathway. These findings have implications for developing targeted interventions for Chinese-speaking children with DD.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging