What Components of Working Memory Are Impaired in Children with Reading and/or Mathematics Difficulties?

Rui Chen; George K Georgiou; Peng Peng; Yuanyuan Li; Beilei Li; Jiali Wang; Sha Tao

doi:10.3390/children10101719

What Components of Working Memory Are Impaired in Children with Reading and/or Mathematics Difficulties?

Children (Basel). 2023 Oct 23;10(10):1719. doi: 10.3390/children10101719.

Authors

Rui Chen^{1

2}, George K Georgiou³, Peng Peng⁴, Yuanyuan Li^{1

2}, Beilei Li⁵, Jiali Wang^{1

2}, Sha Tao^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
² IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
³ Department of Educational Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G5, Canada.
⁴ Department of Special Education, College of Education, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
⁵ Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.

Abstract

Both reading difficulties (RD) and mathematics difficulties (MD) are common neurodevelopmental disorders. The co-occurrence of RD and MD, known as comorbid RDMD, is estimated to range between 21% and 45% of children with learning disabilities. Deficits in working memory have been reported in both RD and MD groups, as well as among comorbid RDMD. However, previous comorbidity studies have only examined the role of some components of working memory, and they do not strictly match their groups on relevant reading and mathematics tasks. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the nature of working memory deficits in comorbid RDMD after matching groups based on reading and mathematics tasks. We assessed four groups of children (RD [n = 21, M_age = 10.96 years], MD [n = 24, M_age = 11.04 years], comorbid RDMD [n = 26, M_age = 10.90 years], and chronological-age controls [n = 27, M_age = 10.96 years]) on measures of the phonological loop (word span and digit span forward tasks), central executive (complex word and digit span), and updating tasks (word and digit 2-back). The results of ANCOVA (covarying for gender and non-verbal IQ) showed first that the RD and RDMD groups performed significantly worse than the MD and control groups in both measures of the phonological loop. For the central executive and updating tasks, we found an effect based on stimulus type. For word-related tasks, the RD and comorbid RDMD groups performed worse than the MD and control groups, and for number-related tasks, the MD and comorbid RDMD groups performed worse than the RD and control groups. Taken together, our findings provide support for the correlated liability model of comorbidity, which indicates that working memory deficits experienced by the RDMD group are an additive combination of deficits observed in the RD and MD groups, suggesting that working memory tasks used to examine underlying deficits in reading and/or mathematics difficulties may dictate whether or not significant group differences are found.

Keywords: comorbidity; learning disabilities; mathematics; reading; working memory.

Abstract

Grants and funding