Remediation of a phonological representation deficit in Chinese children with dyslexia: A comparison between metalinguistic training and working memory training

A form-preparation task in the language production field was adopted to examine output phonological representations in Chinese dyslexia and their susceptibility to training. Forty-one Chinese children with dyslexia (7-11 years old) and 36 chronological age controls completed this task. The controls demonstrated a marginally significant syllable facilitation effect (d = -0.13), indicating their use of syllable-sized phonological representations during speech production, while the group with dyslexia showed a significantly different pattern (d = 0.04), opposite to the direction of a facilitation effect. The children with dyslexia were then randomly assigned to either metalinguistic training (N = 22) or working memory training (N = 19). Only the metalinguistic training subgroup demonstrated a significant syllable facilitation effect afterward (metalinguistic: d = -0.13; working memory: d = -0.01). The results suggest the presence of a phonological representation deficit at the syllable level in Chinese dyslexia and its possible remediation by metalinguistic training. Such a phonological deficit in readers of a logographic script strongly supports the impaired phonological representation view of developmental dyslexia. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/zT2Be0xMkh0.