%0 Journal Article
%T A Cross
%A Cesare Cornoldi
%A Enrico Toffalini
%A Mara Marsura
%A Ricardo Basso Garcia
%J Journal of Learning Disabilities
%@ 1538-4780
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0022219418786691
%X 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 visual-phonological 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
%K cross-modal binding
%K working memory
%K dyslexia
%K reading disability
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022219418786691