Speech perception and frequency discrimination in good and poor readers

Abstract

The relation between speech perception and reading ability was investigated. Identification and discrimination tests with stimuli on a stop consonant place of articulation continuum (/pA/-/tA/) were presented to various groups of good and poor readers (normal first graders on a reading continuum in Study 1, moderately and severely dyslexic and high-and low-achieving normal children in Study 2). In both studies, reading-related perception differences were especially marked in a comparison of actual and predicted (from identification test) discrimination scores, suggesting that the poor readers have special difficulty with a discrimination-specific task demand. In Study 3, reading-group differences still show up if the stimulus pairs of the discrimination test are simply to be repeated (eliminating the similarity judgment factors), and are also very pronounced on a nonspeech discrimination test (with 130 ms pure tones of slightly different frequencies). In Studies 1 and 3 identification slope and phoneme boundary differences between reader groups were found as well. Though these results do not definitely prove the auditory perception hypothesis, they support it. The conditions that should be satisfied by auditory perception tasks in future reading acquisition research are briefly discussed.On various verbal-processing tasks, poorly reading children are less proficient than their normal or superior reading contemporaries (Vellutino, 1979). Several experiments suggest the core of poor readers' verbal-processing deficits concerns something about their use of phonological codes in short-term memory. The well-known "rhyming effect" studies (e.g.,

Perceptual learning as a tool for boosting working memory among individuals with reading and learning disability

“…In addition, many LDs also have difficulties with simple auditory discriminations (e.g. Tallal, 1980;De Weirdt, 1988;Reed, 1989;McAnally and Stein, 1996;Heath et al, 1999;Ahissar et al, 2000;McArthur and Bishop, 2001;Witton et al, 2002;Sharma et al, 2006;McArthur et al, 2008). These difficulties led to the formulation of the 'sensory' hypothesis, suggesting that LDs' poorer memory and language abilities stem from poorer stimulus processing skills (Tallal, 1980).…”

Neural plasticity following auditory training in children with learning problems

“…Many children with reading problems exhibit deficits in the perception of speech sounds (de Weirdt, 1988;Elliott et al, 1989;Watson and Miller, 1993). This has been attributed to inadequate phonological awareness skills and/or difficulties in perceiving brief sounds (including rapid spectral changes) which occur in speech (Golden and Steiner, 1969;Godfrey et al, 1981;Lieberman et al, 1985;Werker and Tees, 1987;Liberman et al, 1989;Reed, 1989;Elbro et al, 1994;Torgesen and Barker, 1995;Kraus et al, 1996;Merzenich et al, 1996;Stark and Heinz, 1996;Tallal et al, 1996;Mody et al, 1997;Schulte-Koerne et al, 1999).…”

Impaired Speech Perception in Poor Readers: Evidence from Hearing and Speech Reading

“…Poor readers count as normal in on-line perception of spoken language, but a small number of studies have reported inferior perception of auditory verbal stimuli by poor readers (Brady, Poggie, & Merlo, 1986;Brady, Shankweiler, & Mann, 1983;de Weirdt, 1988;Godfrey, Syrdal-Laskey, Millay, & Knox. 1981;Lieberman, Meskill, Chatillon, & Schupack, 1985;Reed, 1989;Tallal, 1980;Werker & Tees, 1987).…”

“…In a preliminary report of the data presented below we also found impairments in speech processing (de Gelder & Vroomen, 1988). The latter study, like the ones by Godfrey et al (1981), Werker andTees (1987), andDe Weirdt (1988), used a categorical speech perception paradigm. So did Irasquin and de Gelder (1997) in a study that found impaired perception for a place of articulation continuum.…”