Speech perception in severely disabled and average reading children (original) (raw)

ll has been hypothesized thai children with specific disabilities in reading may have subtle auditory and/or speech perception deficits. To address this question, recent investigations have focussed on whether reading disabled children show categorical speech perception. These efforts have yielded equivocal results. The present study was designed to attempt to help resolve this controversy by comparing the performance of severely disabled readers with normal readers in four speech perception tasks. Results indicated that perception was significantly less categorical among the severely disabled readers in ihrcc of the lour speech perception tasks. The possible implications of this small, but significant, difference arc discussed. KESUME II a ete suggcre que des cnlants ayant des diflicultcs a lire pouvaicnt avoir des deficits subtils d'audition ct/ou de perception du langagc. Les eludes qui se sont aftaquccs a ce problcmc ont produit des rcsultats pour le moins equivoques. L'ctudc presentee ici a tenUS dc rcsoudre cette controverse en comparant la performance d'enfants en difficultc dc lecture avee des enfants normaux dans quatre taches dc perception du langagc. Les resultats ont montrc que la perception etait significativement moins categoriquc the/, les enfants handicapes dans trois des quatre taches. Les implications de cettc difference, petite mais significative, sont discuses. The relation between speech perception and the process of reading has been outlined previously (Godfrey, Syrdal-Lasky, Millay, & Knox, 1981). Basically, in reading, the printed word has to be mapped on to the underlying phonologic representation (Liberman, 1983; Read, 1971). This process includes converting individual graphemes to phonemes and strings of graphemes to the overlapping and highly encoded (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967) larger linguistic units such as syllables and words. In order to make this conversion, the reader must have a stable, context-independent phonological representation available on which to map the linguistic units. Research in speech perception has shown that adults, children, and even prelinguistic infants tend to perceive speech sounds in a categorical fashion. That is, when presented with several varying naturally produced speech syllables or *We wish to thank the students, staff, and board members of the Kenneth Gordon School in New Westminster, BC and the students, staff, and school board ol'licc of the Vancouver Public Schools for their participation and cooperation in this project. Special thanks are extended to Margaret Follis, principal of the Kenneth Gordon School. Our appreciation is also extended to Dr. Alvin M. Liberman, Director, Haskins Laboratory, for making us welcome at Haskins, to Dr. Ignatious Mattingly for help synthesizing the stimuli, and to Dr. Patrice Dunn for serving as a consultant to the grant. Special thanks to Kathy Searcy for all the hours she spent collecting the data and to Margaret Arab for performing the data analyses.