Around 5-10% of school children in China suffer from reading disabilities. Previous studies have shown that children with developmental dyslexia have deficits in encoding and retrieval information. Moreover, many studies have provided evidence that performing actions can promote the encoding and retrieval of memory compared to verbal tasks. Therefore, we expected that performing actions can improve the memory performance of children with developmental dyslexia. However, memory for actions of children with developmental dyslexia has not been sufficiently explored. The present study used a 2 (group: dyslexic or typical) × 2 (type of encoding: subject-performed task or verbal task) between-subjects design to examine whether subject-performed task could enhance the memory performance of children with developmental dyslexia. The results revealed that performing actions not only improves the memory performance of the typical group but also of the dyslexic group. We suggest that performing actions can improve the level of self-involvement during encoding and enhance item accessibility during retrieval of memory of children with dyslexia, thus compensating for the memory reduction caused by the deficits of rehearsal and retrieval strategies of children with dyslexia.
Keywords: Developmental dyslexia; Strategy deficit; Subject-performed task; Verbal task.