The role of phonological awareness, speech perception, and auditory temporal processing for dyslexia (original) (raw)
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Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014
This study investigated whether auditory, speech perception, and phonological skills are tightly interrelated or independently contributing to reading. We assessed each of these three skills in 36 adults with a past diagnosis of dyslexia and 54 matched normal reading adults. Phonological skills were tested by the typical threefold tasks, i.e., rapid automatic naming, verbal short-term memory and phonological awareness. Dynamic auditory processing skills were assessed by means of a frequency modulation (FM) and an amplitude rise time (RT); an intensity discrimination task (ID) was included as a non-dynamic control task. Speech perception was assessed by means of sentences and words-in-noise tasks. Group analyses revealed significant group differences in auditory tasks (i.e., RT and ID) and in phonological processing measures, yet no differences were found for speech perception. In addition, performance on RT discrimination correlated with reading but this relation was mediated by pho...
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.
2005
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 preschool 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 preschool data were retrospectively reanalyzed. On average, children showing both increased family risk and literacy-impairment at the end of first grade, presented significant preschool 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.
Phonological but not auditory discrimination is impaired in dyslexia
European Journal of Neuroscience, 2006
Deficient phonological skills are considered to be a core problem in developmental dyslexia. Children with dyslexia often demonstrate poorer performance than non-impaired readers when categorizing speech-sounds. Using the automatic mismatch response, we show that in contrast to this deficit at the behavioural level, neurophysiological responding in dyslexic children indicates their ability to automatically discriminate syllables. Therefore, the phonological deficit is unlikely to be caused by a temporal deficit or by a noisy functional organization in the respective representational cortex. We obtained measures of reading, spelling and categorical speechperception from 58 dyslexic children and 21 control children. The children also participated in magnetoencephalographic measurements while being stimulated acoustically with the syllables ⁄ ba ⁄ and ⁄ da ⁄ in an oddball paradigm. Mismatch field (MMF) amplitudes between standard and deviant stimuli were obtained. Dyslexic children performed more poorly than control children on all test measures. However, the groups did not differ in MMF amplitude or latency. No correlations were found between MMF amplitudes and behavioural performance.These results were obtained with a large sample size and thus speak robustly against a general deficit in auditory discrimination in dyslexia. These results are compatible with the idea that decoding difficulties occur later in the processing stream where access to the phonological lexicon is attempted.
Auditory processing skills and phonological representation in dyslexic children
Dyslexia, 2004
It is now well-established that there is a causal connection between children's phonological skills and their acquisition of reading and spelling. Here we study low-level auditory processes that may underpin the development of phonological representations in children. Dyslexic and control children were given a battery of phonological tasks, reading and spelling tasks and auditory processing tasks. Potential relations between deficits in dyslexic performance in the auditory processing tasks and phonological awareness were explored. It was found that individual differences in auditory tasks requiring amplitude envelope rise time processing explained significant variance in phonological processing. It is argued that developmentally, amplitude envelope cues may be primary in establishing well-specified phonological representations, as these cues should yield important rhythmic and syllable-level information about speech.
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.
1990
We investigated phonological awareness and spelling skills among normal readers and spellers in Grades 1 and 2 and among dyslexics who scored at the same level as the normals on a standardized spelling test. Both normal children and dyslexics had difficulty with consonants in word-initial clusters in a phoneme recognition task and a phoneme deletion task. Also, both groups of children had trouble producing legal spellings of syllables with initial clusters, sometimes failing to represent the second consonants of the clusters. The dyslexics' phonological awareness and spelling skills were poorer than those of the younger normal children, but the two groups showed similar patterns of performance. 8 1990
Comparing the phonological and double deficit hypotheses for developmental dyslexia
2001
This study tested the predictions of the phonological and double deficit hypotheses by experimentally examining speech perception, phoneme awareness, lexical retrieval (serial and discrete), articulatory speed, and verbal STM in school age child (N = 35) and adolescent (N = 36) dyslexics, and both chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA) controls. The results confirmed the findings of previous studies of a deficit in phoneme awareness in developmental dyslexia. At both age levels, dyslexics performed significantly more poorly than both their CA and RA controls. Although deficits in the other processes investigated, particularly in rapid serial naming, were also apparent, they were not as clear-cut as the deficit in phoneme awareness. In general, definite evidence of a deficit in rapid serial naming was limited to the more severely impaired dyslexics. Furthermore, although rapid serial naming contributed independent variation to various literacy skills, its contribution was modest relative to the contribution of phoneme awareness, regardless of whether the literacy skill relied more or less heavily on phonological or orthographic coding skills. Further analyses suggested that variation in rapid serial skill is particularly important for fluent reading of text, whereas phoneme awareness is particularly important for the development of the ability to read by phonologically recoding letters or groups of letters in words into their phonological codes. This explains the relatively strong contribution of phoneme awareness to reading and spelling ability in general. In sum, the phonological hypothesis offers a more parsimonious account of the present results than the double deficit hypothesis.