General Deficits of Both Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Visual Statistical Learning in Chinese Children with Reading Difficulties

Purpose Statistical learning is crucial to reading acquisition. Accumulating evidence suggests that individuals with reading difficulties exhibit statistical learning deficits, yet whether these deficits are specific to the linguistic domain remains elusive. We examined visual statistical learning (VSL) deficits for both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD).Method Twenty-four Chinese children with reading difficulties (11 females; 46%) and 24 age-matched controls (12 females; 50%) participated in this study. All children were third-grade students and native Mandarin speakers. We used the triplet-learning paradigm with a familiarization phase (online learning) and a test phase (offline learning) to examine the VSL of both linguistic and non-linguistic regularities.Results Children with reading difficulties demonstrated significantly slower online learning rates and lower offline learning accuracy compared to controls in both the linguistic and non-linguistic VSL tasks. Critically, linguistic VSL explained unique variances in word reading abilities, even after controlling for the effects of reading-related and cognitive skills, such as phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and working memory.Conclusion These findings suggest that Chinese children with reading difficulties exhibit general VSL deficits across linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli, and statistical learning plays a significant role in Chinese reading.