A Cross-Modal Working Memory Binding Span Deficit in Reading Disability

Successful reading demands the ability to combine visual-phonological information into a single representation and is associated with an efficient short-term memory. Reading disability may consequently involve an impaired working memory binding of visual and phonological information. The present study proposes two span tasks for assessing visualphonological working memory binding. The tasks involved memorizing cross-modal associations between nonsense figures and nonwords, and they were administered, with other working memory measures, to children with and without a reading disability. The tasks required recognizing which figure was associated with a given nonword and recalling which nonword was associated with a given figure. Children with a reading disability had a similar significant deficit in both cross-modal binding tasks when compared with the control children, and the difference remained significant even after controlling for other verbal and nonverbal working memory measures. The cross-modal binding tasks described here seem to capture a core aspect of working memory associated with reading and may be a useful procedure for assessing reading disabilities.