1,485 research outputs found
Speech perception abilities of adults with dyslexia: is there any evidence for a true deficit?
PURPOSE: This study investigated whether adults with dyslexia show evidence of a consistent speech perception deficit by testing phoneme categorization and word perception in noise. METHOD: Seventeen adults with dyslexia and 20 average readers underwent a test battery including standardized reading, language and phonological awareness tests, and tests of speech perception. Categorization of a pea/bee voicing contrast was evaluated using adaptive identification and discrimination tasks, presented in quiet and in noise, and a fixed-step discrimination task. Two further tests of word perception in noise were presented. RESULTS: There were no significant group differences for categorization in quiet or noise, across- and within-category discrimination as measured adaptively, or word perception, but average readers showed better across- and within-category discrimination in the fixed-step discrimination task. Individuals did not show consistent poor performance across related tasks. CONCLUSIONS: The small number of group differences, and lack of consistent poor individual performance, suggests weak support for a speech perception deficit in dyslexia. It seems likely that at least some poor performances are attributable to nonsensory factors like attention. It may also be that some individuals with dyslexia have speech perceptual acuity that is at the lower end of the normal range and exacerbated by nonsensory factors
Auditory and speech processing in specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia
This thesis investigates auditory and speech processing in Specific Language
Impairment (SLI) and dyslexia. One influential theory of SLI and dyslexia postulates
that both SLI and dyslexia stem from similar underlying sensory deficit that impacts
speech perception and phonological development leading to oral language and literacy
deficits. Previous studies, however, have shown that these underlying sensory deficits
exist in only a subgroup of language impaired individuals, and the exact nature of these
deficits is still largely unknown.
The present thesis investigates three aspects of auditory-phonetic interface: 1) The
weighting of acoustic cues to phonetic voicing contrast 2) the preattentive and attentive
discrimination of speech and non-linguistic stimuli and 3) the formation of auditory
memory traces for speech and non-linguistic stimuli in young adults with SLI and
dyslexia. This thesis focuses on looking at both individial and group-level data of
auditory and speech processing and their relationship with higher-level language
measures. The groups of people with SLI and dyslexia who participated were aged
between 14 and 25 and their performance was compared to a group of controls matched
on chronological age, IQ, gender and handedness.
Investigations revealed a complex pattern of behaviour. The results showed that
individuals with SLI or dyslexia are not poor at discriminating sounds (whether speech
or non-speech). However, in all experiments, there was more variation and more outliers
in the SLI group indicating that auditory deficits may occur in a small subgroup of the
SLI population. Moreover, investigations of the exact nature of the input-processing
deficit revealed that some individuals with SLI have less categorical representations for
speech sounds and that they weight the acoustic cues to phonemic identity differently
from controls and dyslexics
Predicting future reading problems based on pre-reading auditory measures: a longitudinal study of children with a familial risk of dyslexia
Purpose: This longitudinal study examines measures of temporal auditory processing
in pre-reading children with a family risk of dyslexia. Specifically, it attempts to
ascertain whether pre-reading auditory processing, speech perception, and phonological
awareness (PA) reliably predict later literacy achievement. Additionally, this study
retrospectively examines the presence of pre-reading auditory processing, speech
perception, and PA impairments in children later found to be literacy impaired.
Method: Forty-four pre-reading children with and without a family risk of dyslexia were
assessed at three time points (kindergarten, first, and second grade). Auditory processing
measures of rise time (RT) discrimination and frequency modulation (FM) along with
speech perception, PA, and various literacy tasks were assessed.
Results: Kindergarten RT uniquely contributed to growth in literacy in grades one and
two, even after controlling for letter knowledge and PA. Highly significant concurrent and
predictive correlations were observed with kindergarten RT significantly predicting first
grade PA. Retrospective analysis demonstrated atypical performance in RT and PA at all
three time points in children who later developed literacy impairments.
Conclusions: Although significant, kindergarten auditory processing contributions to
later literacy growth lack the power to be considered as a single-cause predictor; thus
results support temporal processing deficits’ contribution within a multiple deficit model
of dyslexia
Grapheme-phoneme learning in an unknown orthography: a study in typical reading and dyslexic children
In this study, we examined the learning of new grapheme-phoneme correspondences in individuals with and without dyslexia. Additionally, we investigated the relation between grapheme-phoneme learning and measures of phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge and rapid automatized naming, with a focus on the unique joint variance of grapheme-phoneme learning to word and non-word reading achievement. Training of grapheme-phoneme associations consisted of a 20-min training program in which eight novel letters (Hebrew) needed to be paired with speech sounds taken from the participant's native language (Dutch). Eighty-four third grade students, of whom 20 were diagnosed with dyslexia, participated in the training and testing. Our results indicate a reduced ability of dyslexic readers in applying newly learned grapheme-phoneme correspondences while reading words which consist of these novel letters. However, we did not observe a significant independent contribution of grapheme-phoneme learning to reading outcomes. Alternatively, results from the regression analysis indicate that failure to read may be due to differences in phonological and/or orthographic knowledge but not to differences in the grapheme-phoneme-conversion process itself
Delayed development of phonological constancy in toddlers at family risk for dyslexia
Available online 20 June 2019.Phonological constancy refers to infants’ ability to disregard variations in the phonetic realisation of speech sounds that do not indicate lexical
contrast, e.g., when listening to accented speech. In typically-developing infants, this ability develops between 15- and 19-months of age, coinciding
with the consolidation of infants’ native phonological competence and vocabulary growth. Here we investigated the developmental time course of
phonological constancy in infants at family risk for developmental dyslexia, using a longitudinal design. Developmental dyslexia is a disorder
affecting the acquisition of reading and spelling skills, and it also affects early auditory processing, speech perception, and lexical acquisition. Infants
at-risk and not at-risk for dyslexia, based on a family history of dyslexia, participated when they were 15-, 19-, and 26-months of age. Phonological
constancy was indexed by comparing at-risk and not at-risk infants’ ability to recognise familiar words in two preferential looking tasks: (1) a task
using words presented in their native accent, and (2) a task using words presented in a non-native accent. We expected a delay in phonological
constancy for the at-risk infants. As predicted, in the non-native accent task, not at-risk infants recognised familiar words by 19 months, but at-risk
infants did not. The control infants thus exhibited phonological constancy. By 26 months, at-risk toddlers did show successful word recognition in
the native accent task. However, for the non-native accent task at 26 months, neither at-risk nor control infants showed familiar word recognition.
These findings are discussed in terms of the impact of family risk for dyslexia on toddlers’ consolidation of early phonological and lexical skills.This research was supported by the Australian Research Council grant DP110105123, ‘The Seeds of Literacy’, to the 3rd and 2nd authors
Sensory theories of developmental dyslexia: three challenges for research.
Recent years have seen the publication of a range of new theories suggesting that the basis of dyslexia might be sensory dysfunction. In this Opinion article, the evidence for and against several prominent sensory theories of dyslexia is closely scrutinized. Contrary to the causal claims being made, my analysis suggests that many proposed sensory deficits might result from the effects of reduced reading experience on the dyslexic brain. I therefore suggest that longitudinal studies of sensory processing, beginning in infancy, are required to successfully identify the neural basis of developmental dyslexia. Such studies could have a powerful impact on remediation.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from NPG at http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v16/n1/abs/nrn3836.html
Can children with speech difficulties process an unfamiliar accent?
This study explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have particular difficulty in processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties (n = 18) were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. First, an accent auditory lexical decision task was administered. In one condition, the children made lexical decisions about stimuli presented in their own accent (London). In the second condition, the stimuli were spoken in an unfamiliar accent (Glaswegian). The results showed that the children with speech difficulties had a specific deficit on the unfamiliar accent. Performance on the other auditory discrimination tasks revealed additional deficits at lower levels of input processing. The wider clinical implications of the findings are considered
Word Superiority Effects in Dyslexics
Distorting the word superiority effect with intraword spacing was used to investigate the processing difference in single-word reading for dyslexics and controls. Perfetti’s Reading model suggests that dyslexics would have reduced processing capacity with intraword spacing. Results from a Covid-modified experimental protocol generally did not support the hypothesis. There was poor differentiation between groups in the word capacity coefficient. Response time by itself was also not informative. However, dyslexics had reduced accuracy in distractor identification across intraword spacings due to the lack of retention in phonological working memory or attention in central executive deficit (Alt, Fox, Levy, et al., 2022; Gray, Green, Alt, et al., 2017) as matching targets was not an issue, only confirmation of an update was problematic. In target identification, early responses and later responses were predictive of WIAT III Pseudoword (phonetic processing) and WAIS-IV Symbol Search (visuospatial matching task). These preliminary results motivate further research regarding word processing differences in dyslexic and controls
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