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Writing Fluency and Consistency Problems in Chinese Children with Reading Difficulties: A Potential Role for Procedural Memory
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Poster D49 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Jueyao LIN1, Dustin Kai-Yan Lau1, Caicai Zhang1, Yee Lok Chung1, Michael T. Ullman2; 1Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2Georgetown University
Reading difficulties (RD) in children frequently coincide with writing issues, suggesting interlinked cognitive processes underlying these skills. However, previous research on writing problems in children with RD has focused on overall handwriting accuracy, and seldom touched upon the online handwriting process. Here we examined handwriting fluency (i.e., pauses during handwriting) and handwriting consistency (i.e., stroke order consistency in writing the same constituents) among Chinese children with RD. Based on the Procedural circuit Deficit Hypothesis (PDH; Ullman et al., 2020), we hypothesized a potential contribution of procedural memory to handwriting difficulties in RD. The PDH suggests that RD may be partially explained by impairments of procedural memory, which is defined as the learning and memory that depend on the basal ganglia and associated circuitry. Forty-four native Cantonese-speaking children (6.42-11.92 years old, mean = 9.10 years ) participated in this study. Twenty-two were diagnosed with RD, while 22 showed typical development (TD). We measured handwriting fluency in terms of the duration of pauses between successive strokes (inter-stroke intervals or ISIs) in a Chinese character copying task (Lau, 2020), utilizing repeated radicals across four blocks to assess children's grasp of radicals as functional writing units in Chinese. Longer ISIs indicated prolonged pauses and represented lower handwriting fluency. Handwriting consistency (how many radicals were repeated in the same stroke order) and repetition benefits (improved fluency or ISI reduction across blocks) were also assessed. Procedural memory was assessed with sequence learning (the difference in reaction time between randomly ordered items and sequenced items) in a Serial Reaction Time task (SRT; Lum et al., 2012), which has been shown to rely on the basal ganglia (Janacsek et al., 2020). Results from a mixed-effects model showed significant radical-level processing (i.e., longer between-radical ISIs than within-radical ISIs) in both groups, but the children with RD exhibited significantly longer between-radical ISIs than the TD children, suggesting less fluent retrieval of radicals or motor planning in the children with RD. Furthermore, the TD children displayed a consistent reduction in ISIs across blocks, an effect that was absent in the children with RD, indicative of diminished repetition benefits in the RD children's handwriting fluency. Additionally, the children with RD showed significantly lower handwriting consistency than the TD children. While the children with RD showed a non-significant trend towards worse procedural learning than the TD children in the SRT task (p = 0.07), we observed a significant three-way interaction between group (RD vs TD), blocks, and procedural learning in a mixed-effects model. Specifically, better procedural learning only predicted greater repetition benefits (ISI reduction across blocks) for writing fluency in the TD children, but not in the children with RD. In conclusion, our preliminary results revealed handwriting fluency and consistency difficulties in Chinese children with RD, and supported PDH by showing a differential role for procedural memory in the writing processes of TD children versus those with RD. The findings have potential translational applications in clinical interventions and educational strategies.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, Writing and Spelling