Perceptual Anchoring in Preschool Children: Not Adultlike, but There (original) (raw)
Related papers
Research in …, 2011
Developmental dyslexia is characterized by severe reading and spelling difficulties that are persistent and resistant to the usual didactic measures and remedial efforts. It is well established that a major cause of these problems lies in poorly specified phonological representations. Many individuals with dyslexia also present impairments in auditory temporal processing and speech perception, but it remains debated whether these more basic perceptual impairments play a role in causing the reading problem. Longitudinal studies may help clarifying this issue by assessing preschool children before they receive reading instruction and by following them up through literacy development. The current longitudinal study shows impairments in auditory frequency modulation (FM) detection, speech perception and phonological awareness in kindergarten and in grade 1 in children who receive a dyslexia diagnosis in grade 3. FM sensitivity and speech-in-noise perception in kindergarten uniquely contribute to growth in reading ability, even after controlling for letter knowledge and phonological awareness. These findings indicate that impairments in auditory processing and speech perception are not merely an epiphenomenon of reading failure. Although no specific directional relations were observed between auditory processing, speech perception and phonological awareness, the highly significant concurrent and predictive correlations between all these variables suggest a reciprocal association and corroborate the evidence for the auditory deficit theory of dyslexia.
Auditory frequency discrimination in children with dyslexia
Journal of Research in Reading, 2006
It has been proposed that specific language impairment (SLI) is caused by an impairment of auditory processing, but it is unclear whether this problem affects temporal processing, frequency discrimination (FD), or both. Furthermore, there are few longitudinal studies in this area, making it hard to establish whether any deficit represents a developmental lag or a more permanent deficit. To address these issues, the authors retested a group of 10 children with SLI and 12 control children first tested 42 months previously. At Time 1, the children with SLI (between 9 and 12 years of age) had significantly elevated FD thresholds compared to the matched controls. At Time 2, the thresholds of both groups had improved, but the children with SLI still had poorer FD thresholds than those of the controls. To assess temporal resolution, auditory backward masking was measured and it was found that most of the children with SLI performed as well as the controls, but 2 children had exceptionally high thresholds. There was also greater variability among the children with SLI compared to that measured among the controls on the FD task. These studies indicate considerable heterogeneity in auditory function among children with SLI and suggest that, as with auditory temporal deficits, difficulties in FD discrimination are important in this population.
Cortex, 2010
Auditory processing Event-related potentials (ERPs) Infant a b s t r a c t The role played by an auditory-processing deficit in dyslexia has been debated for several decades. In a longitudinal study using brain event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated 1) whether dyslexic children with familial risk background would show atypical pitch processing from birth and 2) how these newborn ERPs later relate to these same children's pre-reading cognitive skills and literacy outcomes. Auditory ERPs were measured at birth for tones varying in pitch and presented in an oddball paradigm (1100 Hz, 12%, and 1000 Hz, 88%). The brain responses of the typically reading control group children (TRC group, N ¼ 25) showed clear differentiation between the frequencies, while those of the group of reading disability with familial risk (RDFR, 8 children) and the group of typical readers with familial risk (TRFR, 14 children) did not differentiate between the tones. The ERPs of the latter two groups differed from those of the TRC group. However, the two risk groups also showed a differential hemispheric ERP pattern. Furthermore, newborn ERPs reflecting passive change detection were associated with phonological skills and letter knowledge prior to school age and with phoneme duration perception, reading speed (RS) and spelling accuracy in the 2nd grade of school. The early obligatory response was associated with more general pre-school language skills, as well as with RS and reading accuracy (RA).
Brain and Language, 2006
In this project, the hypothesis of an auditory temporal processing deWcit in dyslexia was tested by examining auditory processing in relation to phonological skills in two contrasting groups of Wve-year-old preschool children, a familial high risk and a familial low risk group. Participants were individually matched for gender, age, non-verbal IQ, school environment, and parental educational level. Psychophysical thresholds were estimated for gap-detection, frequency modulation detection, and tone-in-noise detection using a three-interval forced-choice adaptive staircase paradigm embedded within a computer game. Phonological skills were measured by tasks assessing phonological awareness, rapid serial naming, and verbal short-term memory. SigniWcant group diVerences were found for phonological awareness and letter knowledge. In contrast, none of the auditory tasks diVerentiated signiWcantly between both groups. However, both frequency modulation and tone-in-noise detection were signiWcantly related to phonological awareness. This relation with phonological skills was not present for gap-detection.
Factors affecting frequency discrimination in school-aged children and adults
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013
Auditory frequency discrimination is a basic ability that may limit the maturation of speech and language skills in some listeners. Despite its importance, the factors affecting frequency discrimination in school-aged children are poorly understood. The goal of the present study was to evaluate effects related to memory for pitch, musical training, and the utilization of temporal fine-structure cues. Listeners were normal-hearing children, 5.1 to 13.6 years old, and adults. One subgroup of children had musical training (>150 hours) and the other did not. The standard stimulus was either a 500-or a 5000-Hz pure tone, and the target stimulus was either a tone of higher frequency or a frequency-modulated tone (2-or 20-Hz rate) centered on the standard frequency. As commonly observed, mean frequency discrimination thresholds tended to be elevated in younger listeners. This developmental effect was smaller for FM detection than for pure-tone frequency discrimination, consistent with an effect of memory for pitch. The child/adult difference tended to be smaller for musically trained than untrained children. Children were not particularly poor at 2-Hz FM detection for the 500-Hz standard, a condition thought to rely on temporal fine-structure cues. (Work supported by NIDCD R03DC008389.
Neuropsychologia, 2007
This study investigates whether the core bottleneck of literacy-impairment should be situated at the phonological level or at a more basic sensory level, as postulated by supporters of the auditory temporal processing theory. Phonological ability, speech perception and low-level auditory processing were assessed in a group of 5-year-old pre-school children at high-family risk for dyslexia, compared to a group of wellmatched low-risk control children. Based on family risk status and first grade literacy achievement children were categorized in groups and pre-school data were retrospectively reanalyzed. On average, children showing both increased family risk and literacy-impairment at the end of first grade, presented significant pre-school deficits in phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, speech-in-noise perception and frequency modulation detection. The concurrent presence of these deficits before receiving any formal reading instruction, might suggest a causal relation with problematic literacy development. However, a closer inspection of the individual data indicates that the core of the literacy problem is situated at the level of higher-order phonological processing. Although auditory and speech perception problems are relatively over-represented in literacy-impaired subjects and might possibly aggravate the phonological and literacy problem, it is unlikely that they would be at the basis of these problems. At a neurobiological level, results are interpreted as evidence for dysfunctional processing along the auditory-to-articulation stream that is implied in phonological processing, in combination with a relatively intact or inconsistently impaired functioning of the auditory-to-meaning stream that subserves auditory processing and speech perception.
Sensitivity to Auditory and Visual Stimuli During Early Reading Development
Journal of Research in …, 2007
An investigation was conducted into the visual and auditory temporal processing profiles of two groups of 4- to 6-year-old children: pre-alphabetic children, who showed no alphabetic ability (failing to read any non-words in a test), and those who demonstrated some alphabetic ability. This alphabetic group showed higher scores in reading and spelling attainment than the pre-alphabetic group. They were also faster than the pre-alphabetic group in reacting to the onset and offset of auditory and visual stimuli. However, when age was used as a covariate, only reaction times (RTs) to the offsets of visual stimuli were found to be faster in the alphabetic than the pre-alphabetic group. This suggests that responses to the offset of visual stimuli are becoming more rapid during the same developmental period when alphabetic ability is beginning to be acquired. Within the alphabetic group, after accounting for age, visual and auditory onset RTs were strongly correlated, whereas within the pre-alphabetic group there were high correlations between visual and auditory offset RTs. It is therefore suggested that a strong association between RTs to visual and auditory onsets may be beneficial during early alphabetic acquisition, when phoneme–grapheme associations are established. Multiple regression analyses showed visual offset RT as the only variable to account for a significant amount of variance in spelling attainment after age was taken into account, which may relate to Frith's (1985) contention that spelling is important in driving early alphabetic ability.
Age‐related improvements in auditory temporal resolution in reading‐impaired children
2003
Abstract Individuals with developmental dyslexia show impairments in processing that require precise timing of sensory events. Here, we show that in a test of auditory temporal acuity (a gap-detection task) children ages 6–9 years with dyslexia exhibited a significant deficit relative to age-matched controls. In contrast, this deficit was not observed in groups of older reading-impaired individuals (ages 10–11 years; 12–13 years) or in adults (ages 23–25 years).
Auditory frequency discrimination in infancy
Developmental Psychology, 1982
The ability of 5-8-month-old infants and of young adults to detect changes in the frequency of pure tones was investigated. A head turn for visual reinforcement technique was used to obtain difference thresholds for 14 infants and 5 adults at 1000, 2000, and 3000 Hz. With signals presented at 70 dB above adult detection thresholds, infants reliably detected frequency changes on the order of 2%, whereas adults could detect changes of about 1%. These data not only confirm the findings of previous, studies that infants can distinguish different frequencies but indicate that infants can make relatively fine discriminations. ciation, New York, September 1979. We are grateful to