Modality and redundancy effects, and their relation to executive functioning in children with dyslexia.
Spoken words plus pictures speed up new learning for kids with dyslexia, while text plus pictures works better for typical readers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked 60 third-graders to study short science lessons. Half had dyslexia, half read at grade level.
Each child saw the lesson in one of three ways: written words with pictures, spoken words with pictures, or spoken plus written words with pictures.
After the lesson, kids answered transfer questions that needed them to apply the new facts. The team also tested their memory a week later.
What they found
Kids with dyslexia scored highest on the transfer test when the lesson was spoken words plus pictures. They scored lowest with written words plus pictures.
Typically developing kids showed the opposite pattern. They learned best with written words plus pictures.
One week later, both groups remembered the same amount, no matter which style they had used.
How this fits with other research
Wachob et al. (2015) tested kids with ASD and found no boost when pictures were added. That seems to clash with the current study, but the kids differ. Dyslexia is a reading problem, ASD is a social-communication problem. Each group needs its own media mix.
Yuan et al. (2020) showed that picture prompts beat echoic prompts during error correction for kids with ASD. Together, these papers tell us pictures help, but only when paired with the right input channel for each diagnosis.
Vie et al. (2017) found that having kids tact pictures while viewing them improved recall. Adding simple tact trials to audio-plus-picture lessons could make the benefit last longer.
Why it matters
If you teach a child with dyslexia, deliver new content through audio plus pictures first. Save the text for review once the idea is clear. For typical readers, keep the text on the screen. This small switch can cut the time needed to master new science or social-studies units.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with dyslexia are often provided with audio-support to compensate for their reading problems, but this may intervene with their learning. The aim of the study was to examine modality and redundancy effects in 21 children with dyslexia, compared to 21 typically developing peers (5th grade), on study outcome (retention and transfer knowledge) and study time in user-paced learning environments and the role of their executive functions (verbal and visual working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility) on these effects. Results showed no effects on retention knowledge. Regarding transfer knowledge, a modality effect in children with dyslexia was found, and a reversed redundancy effect in typically developing children. For transfer knowledge, written text with pictures supported knowledge gain in typically developing children, but not in children with dyslexia who benefited more from auditory-presented information with pictures. Study time showed modality and reversed redundancy effects in both groups. In all children, studying in a written text with pictures condition took longer than with audio replacing the text or being added to it. Results also showed that executive functions were related to learning, but they did not differ between the groups, nor did they impact the found modality and redundancy effects. The present research thus shows that, irrespectively of children's executive functions, adding audio-support for all children, can potentially lead to more efficient learning.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2019 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2019.04.007