Auditory Illusions as Evidence for a Role of the Syllable in Adult Developmental Dyslexics

Abstract

This study investigated whether adult developmental dyslexics differ from normal controls in early stages of spoken language processing that in turn might be related to specific reading difficulties. Subjects were required to detect prespecified targets under dichotic presentation of auditory nonword pairs. The stimuli were made such that segment migrations were possible. The potential contribution of phonetic features, as well as that of phonemes and syllables, was investigated. The results showed that dyslexics had specifically more syllable-based migrations. This result is discussed in the context of well-documented metaphonological deficits and memory problems of poor readers.

Remedial Interventions for Children with Reading Disabilities

“…Speech perception (SP) is the least explored aspect of phonological processing (de Gelder & Vroomen, 1996). However, several studies have shown that there are differences between children with RD and typical readers in auditory categorical perception tasks (e.g., Godfrey, Syrdal-Lasky, Millay, & Knox, 1981;Werker & Tees, 1987), in identifying monosyllabic words present in noise (Brady, Shankweiler, & Mann, 1983), and in discriminating between similar sounding word pairs (Reed, 1989).…”