130 Chapter 5 our study we found rapid automatized naming to be associated to verbal consolidation for children with dyslexia. It is interesting to note that the above described results hold even when phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal working memory, and semantics abilities are included in the analysis. Only the addition of phonological awareness changed the results slightly, as the negative effect of verbal learning on pseudoword decoding was no longer significant and immediate memory span appeared to predict word reading. The second research question was on the compensatory role of verbal learning and consolidation on response to intervention among children with dyslexia. While we expected that better verbal learning and consolidation would be positively related to responsiveness to intervention in children with dyslexia due to the enhancement of semantic and phonological representations, we did not find such a relation. After intervention, children are better able to integrate visual codes, phonological structures and the phonological retrieval, which enables them to read more fluently (Price & Friston, 1997; Simos et al., 2002). We may thus speculate that a tailored intervention diminishes the need for compensation for weaker spelling abilities via verbal learning. This study adds to already existing literature by relating the dynamic process of verbal learningandconsolidationtoreadingandspellingoutcomesof childrenwithandwithout dyslexia and study the impact on response to intervention as well. Some limitations should be acknowledged at this point along with directions of future research. Firstly, although we used a standardized Dutch test for verbal learning and consolidation, this measure of verbal learning contains high-frequency words and could, therefore, also be interpreted as the reactivation of word representations clustered together instead of learning new words and withhold this cluster instead of actual consolidation of new words. Therefore, it would be recommended to include tasks in which new words need to be learned as well (e.g., Elbro & Jensen, 2005). Second, we followed the children with dyslexia over time without incorporating a (randomized) control group to evaluate the effects of the intervention. The latter group could be included in future research in order to find out if within the typically developing group verbal learning and consolidation does not influence the change due to intervention as well. Third, we did not control for the socio-economic status or parental educational level. As prior studies showed that socio-economic status of parents predicts semantic growth (Romeo et al., 2018) this could have influenced our results. We recommend future research to include this variable in their analyses. Fourth, control measures can be refined by choosing a verbal workingmemory test with higher reliability and by adding a measure for morphological awareness, which is also addressed in the intervention. Fifth, differences in verbal learning could also be related to school related factors such as the learning strategies
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw