Auditory attention influences trajectories of symbol-speech sound learning in children with and without dyslexia

The acquisition of letter-speech sound correspondences is a funda-mental process underlying reading development, one that could be influenced by several linguistic and domain-general cognitive fac-tors. In the current study, we mimicked the first steps of this pro-cess by examining behavioral trajectories of audiovisual associative learning in 110 7-to 12-year-old children with and without dyslexia. Children were asked to learn the associations between eight novel symbols and native speech sounds in a brief training and subsequently read words and pseudowords written in the artificial orthography. We then investigated the influence of auditory attention as one of the putative domain-general factors influencing associative learning. To this aim, we assessed children with experimental measures of auditory sustained selective atten-tion and interference control. Our results showed shallower learn-ing trajectories in children with dyslexia, especially during the later phases of the training blocks. Despite this, children with dys-lexia performed similarly to typical readers on the post-training reading tests using the artificial orthography. Better auditory sus-tained selective attention and interference control skills predicted greater response accuracy during training. Sustained selective attention was also associated with the ability to apply these novel correspondences in the reading tests. Although this result has the limitations of a correlational design, it denotes that poor atten-tional skills may constitute a risk during the early stages of reading acquisition, when children start to learn letter-speech sound asso-ciations. Importantly, our findings underscore the importance of examining dynamics of learning in reading acquisition as well as individual differences in more domain-general attentional factors. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecom-mons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).