NSF/SBE-BSF: Trajectories of acquisition, consolidation and retention in incidental auditory category learning

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An estimated 43% of Americans read at or below a basic level of skill necessary to perform simple and everyday activities. This leads to widespread social-economic problems including lower participation in the labor force, heightened reliance on public assistance, poorer outcomes among offspring, and lower civic involvement. It is estimated that this costs the US more than $255 billion annually in lost tax revenue due to unemployment, lowered productivity, and crime. There is a critical need to understand the fundamental cognitive building blocks involved in learning to read, in order to improve the well-being of individuals in society and to improve economic competitiveness. The present project will lay the necessary scientific groundwork to advance understanding of how this learning develops across childhood and into young adulthood. The research team has discovered a connection between poor reading in developmental dyslexia and phonetic acquisition, a foundational aspect of learning to read. Building from this, the project will advance understanding of the developmental course of this learning in relation to mathematical, cognitive and language skills. The research will advance theoretical models of spoken and written language and will support evidence-based approaches to improving the level at which Americans read. The project's broader impact is enhanced by its implications for developmental dyslexia, a common developmental disorder that affects approximately 7% of the population. The research team will also be active in communicating their scientific discoveries to the public to promote STEM literacy in the community. An additional outcome will be training a diverse group of graduate and undergraduate scientists.We do not yet adequately understand the cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that support learning to read, or how they may falter in poor readers. We do know that low literacy is not an isolated limitation in learning written language. Rather, it is associated with diverse learning challenges extending broadly to other aspects of language and even to visual and motor learning. In this context, the core hypothesis of the present project is that domain-general procedural learning supports development of robust phoneme categories, with associated benefits for literacy acquisition. The research team's prior work established that poorer reading skill among adults is associated with poor incidental learning of nonlinguistic auditory categories. The objective of the present project is to characterize procedural auditory category learning and its relationship to reading skill across development. The project involves a bi-national US-Israeli research team with cross-cutting expertise to examine procedural auditory category learning (1) from early childhood to young adulthood to capture earlier and later stages of literacy acquisition and maturation of memory systems; (2) in relation to developing language, cognitive and mathematical abilities, and individual differences; (3) in English and Hebrew, for which literacy demands are distinct; (4) in the context of procedural learning impairments of children and adults with developmental dyslexia; and (5) across periods of offline learning to characterize consolidation and retention of learning. In sum, the project attempts a comprehensive examination of procedural auditory category learning. It will advance understanding of the basic building blocks of literacy with the potential to transform research and theory in the field and to advance evidence-based approaches to addressing low literacy in the US.This project is being supported by a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation.