Language-universal Sensory Deficits in Developmental Dyslexia: English, Spanish, and Chinese

Abstract

Studies in sensory neuroscience reveal the critical importance of accurate sensory perception for cognitive development. There is considerable debate concerning the possible sensory correlates of phonological processing, the primary cognitive risk factor for developmental dyslexia. Across languages, children with dyslexia have a specific difficulty with the neural representation of the phonological structure of speech. The identification of a robust sensory marker of phonological difficulties would enable early identification of risk for developmental dyslexia and early targeted intervention. Here, we explore whether phonological processing difficulties are associated with difficulties in processing acoustic cues to speech rhythm. Speech rhythm is used across languages by infants to segment the speech stream into words and syllables. Early difficulties in perceiving auditory sensory cues to speech rhythm and prosody could lead developmentally to impairments in phonology. We compared matched samples of children with and without dyslexia, learning three very different spoken and written languages, English, Spanish, and Chinese. The key sensory cue measured was rate of onset of the amplitude envelope (rise time), known to be critical for the rhythmic timing of speech. Despite phonological and orthographic differences, for each language, rise time sensitivity was a significant predictor of phonological awareness, and rise time was the only consistent predictor of reading acquisition. The data support a language-universal theory of the neural basis of developmental dyslexia on the basis of rhythmic perception and syllable segmentation. They also suggest that novel remediation strategies on the basis of rhythm and music may offer benefits for phonological and linguistic development.

Speech rhythm and temporal structure: Converging perspectives?

“…The acoustic cues specifying the temporal pattern of these larger speech units are primarily found in the slowly-varying amplitude envelope of the acoustic signal. During the past decade, we have been exploring the role of amplitude envelope perception in the "phonological deficit" in dyslexia across languages (our studies encompass English, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Chinese, and Finnish; e.g., Goswami et al 2002;Richardson et al 2004;Hämäläinen et al 2009;Surányi et al 2009;Goswami et al 2011a).…”

From temporal processing to developmental language disorders: mind the gap

“…Although both theories are supported by evidence of associations between language or reading and the signature task of the theory, there are also a host of findings that cannot fit within these frameworks. For example, there is evidence of impairments in other psychoacoustic tasks, such as duration, intensity or (especially) frequency discrimination, that do not require rapid processing or rise time perception [21,23,27,28,[30][31][32][33][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. There are findings that fail to survive control for IQ [51] and failures to replicate (e.g.…”

Auditory sensory deficits in developmental dyslexia: A longitudinal ERP study

“…One possibility that has been widely investigated at the sensory level is that children with dyslexia have auditory processing difficulties (e.g., Tallal, 1980;Witton et al, 1998;Goswami et al, 2002). One auditory sensory deficit that is found in children with dyslexia across languages is inefficient processing of the rate of change of amplitude envelopes (also called rise time; Goswami et al, 2002Goswami et al, , 2010aHämäläinen et al, 2009;Muneaux et al, 2004;Richardson et al, 2004;Surányi et al, 2009). Here, we extend the investigation of rise time processing in dyslexia to the neural level by using EEG.…”