The moderation effect of rapid temporal processing on the relationship between working memory and Chinese character reading

In the present study, 154 first grade students recruited to investigation the moderation effect of temporal sensitivity on the relationship between visual working memory (WM) and reading in beginning readers. A visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) task measured the participants’ temporal sensitivity. The participants were asked to select which of the two balls presented first with SOAs varied from 8 to 492 ms according to an adaptive psychophysical procedure. Their WM was measured with a visual Corsi backward task; children were asked to remember the jumping routes (i.e., the span was started from 2, and up to 9) of a frog and respond these routes with reversed sequences. The longest span that each participant could response correctly four times from six could be the index of WM. A Chinese character reading measured children’s reading ability at word level, and they were asked to read out 100 characters aloud. After controlling with children’s age, non-verbal intelligence, visual short-term memory, morphological awareness, and orthographic awareness, the results of a moderation effect analysis showed that 1) both visual WM (p < .001) and visual TOT (p = .02) predicted Chinese character reading; 2) a significant moderation effect of visual TOTs on the association between visual WM and Chinese character reading (p = .001). The relation between WM and Chinese character reading was positively significant at visual TOTs above average and the relation was negative significant at visual TOTs relative poor; the relation was insignificant at visual TOTs between these two thresholds. Copyright © 2020 ARWA.