Does a socio-evaluative context modulate the amplitude of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia?
Résumé
Cross-linguistic studies suggest that phonological deficit tends to be a universal marker of reading difficulties in developmental dyslexia (DD). However, there is a debate between the degraded phonological representation hypothesis and the hypothesis that the phonological deficit stems from difficulties in memorizing, accessing and retrieving the phonological representations. Our aim was to determine to what extent a socio-evaluative context modulates the amplitude and the expression of this phonological deficit. We designed tasks that involved the use of phonological syllables in silent reading by jointly manipulating the evaluative pressure of the instructions to saturate the phonological loop of the working memory (known to be impaired in DD). Our results showed that stressful instructions given on the importance to succeed in a reading task impact negatively both the performance and the phonological response patterns of children with DD, more than typically-developing children, suggesting failure to access phonological syllable-based representations under socioevaluative contexts.