Exploring dyslexics' phonological deficit III: foreign speech perception and production

Abstract

This study investigates French dyslexic and control adult participants' ability to perceive and produce two different non-native contrasts (one segmental and one prosodic), across several conditions varying short-term memory load. For this purpose, we selected Korean plosive voicing (whose categories conflict with French ones) as the segmental contrast and lexical stress as the prosodic contrast (French does not use contrastive lexical stress). We also used a French (native) segmental contrast as a control. Tasks were either auditory discrimination or repetition of CVCV nonsense words. Short-term memory load was varied by presenting the stimuli either in isolation, in sequences of two, or in sequences of three. Our results show overall few differences between dyslexic and control participants. In particular, dyslexic participants performed similarly to controls in all tasks involving Korean plosives, whether in discrimination or in production, and regardless of short-term memory load. However, some group differences emerged with respect to lexical stress, in the discrimination task at greater short-term memory load. Various analyses suggest that dyslexic participants' difficulties are due to the meta-phonological nature of the task and to short-term memory load.

Do children with dyslexia and/or specific language impairment compensate for place assimilation? Insight into phonological grammar and representations

“…It is more commensurate with proposals that the deficit is in accessing phonological representations (Blomert et al, 2004;Dickie, 2008;Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008;Soroli et al, 2010). According to this latter proposal, it is when phonological tasks place heavy demands on short-term memory, conscious awareness, and time constraints that individuals with dyslexia perform poorly.…”

“…Yet another hypothesis would be that they do not have degraded phonological representations (Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008;Soroli et al, 2010), or at least not at the segmental level (van der Lely & Marshall, 2011). This would predict no difference with the control children.…”

“…What underlies this phonological deficit is less clear-degraded (i.e., fuzzier, noisier, or underspecified) or, conversely, overspecified phonological representations, limited working memory capacity, and speech perception problems have all been proposed and might be interrelated (Adlard & Hazan, 1998;Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, & Brady, 1997;Serniclaes, Van Heghe, Mousty, Carre, & SprengerCharolles, 2004;Snowling, 2000). A major current research question concerns whether the phonological deficit consists of an actual degradation of phonological representations themselves, or whether it is a deficit in accessing and manipulating those representations (Blomert, Mitterer, & Paffen, 2004;Dickie, 2008;Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008;Soroli, Szenkovits, & Ramus, 2010). 1 SLI also occurs in signed languages, among deaf children who are acquiring a signed language as their native language (Mason et al, 2010).…”

Neural encoding of the speech envelope by children with developmental dyslexia

“…For example, impaired neural entrainment to low-frequency amplitude envelopes should affect the accurate representation of syllable stress and syllable boundaries (Goswami, 2011, Goswami, 2015), impairments that indeed characterise children with dyslexia in some languages (Goswami, Mead, et al, 2013 for English; Jiminez-Fernandez, Gutierrez-Palma, & Defior, 2014 for Spanish, see also Soroli, Szenkovits, & Ramus, 2010 for French [dyslexic adults]). Further, impairments in the auditory processing of amplitude envelope rise times (perceptual cues to modulation rates) are found in children with dyslexia in many languages (to date, Finnish, Spanish, Chinese, English, French, Dutch and Hungarian, Goswami, 2011, Goswami, 2015, for recent summaries).…”

Developmental dyslexia: The difficulties of interpreting poor performance, and the importance of normal performance

“…Another study conducted on adult participants provided a partial replication, finding a striking dissociation between deficits in the awareness of prosodic patterns (using a version of the DeeDee task) and spared automatic processing of prosody, as measured by a task that did not explicitly bear on prosodic patterns, but that used speech material whose prosody was either congruent or incongruent (Mundy, 2011;Mundy & Carroll, in press). Finally, another study on adults reported difficulties in perceiving and producing foreign stress patterns, but that seemed to be entirely explained by the metaphonological nature of the task and by short-term memory load (Soroli, Szenkovits, & Ramus, 2010). Thus, it seems that deficits in prosody perception or production are found in individuals with dyslexia only to the extent that the tasks used involve metalinguistic judgements or other difficulty factors.…”