The role of visual and auditory temporal processing for Chinese children with developmental dyslexia

Abstract

This study examined temporal processing in relation to Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. The performances of 26 Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia on tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological, and phonological awareness were compared with those of 26 reading level ability controls (RL) and 26 chronological age controls (CA). Dyslexic children performed worse than the CA group but similar to the RL group on measures of accurate processing of auditory and visual-order stimuli, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and phonological awareness and a minority performed worse on the two temporal processing tasks. However, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that visual but not auditory temporal processing contributed unique variance to Chinese character recognition even with other cognitive measures controlled, suggesting it may be as important a correlate of reading ability in Chinese as in alphabetic scripts.

Auditory Temporal Processing as a Specific Deficit Among Dyslexic Readers

“…In accord with the literature, we found that dyslexic readers required longer ISIs in order to reproduce the order of the tones presented (Ben-Artzi et al, 2005;Chung et al, 2008;Reed, 1980;Tallal, 1989;Tallal & Piercy, 1973a, 1973b. Others have also found poor performance among dyslexic readers on frequency discrimination tasks (Ahissar et al, 2000;Boets, Wouters, van Wieringen, & Ghesquière, 2006;Cacace et al, 2000;Kujala et al, 2006).…”

“…These results complement a number of earlier findings which reported that adult dyslexics required longer ISIs to reproduce the order of two tones and longer silent periods within a tone to detect the presence of a gap, relative to the normal reader (Ben-Artzi et al, 2005;Chung et al, 2008;Schaffler, Sonntag, Hartnegg, & Fischer, 2004;Tallal, 1980;Tallal & Piercy, 1973a, 1973bReed, 1989;Van Ingelghem et al, 2001), and confirm the hypothesis that the main difficulty among dyslexic readers is in the processing of temporal-related auditory stimuli. These results suggest that dyslexic readers exhibit a specific deficit in auditory temporal processing and not a general perceptual deficit in auditory processing.…”

“…As the performance on these tasks requires the integration of information over time, one might argue that poorer performance reflects auditory temporal processing deficit. In fact, a similar argument was raised regarding the early reports by Tallal and colleagues of auditory temporal deficit in dyslexic readers while using spectral TOJ tasks (Tallal's repetition tests, see Ben-Artzi et al, 2005;Chung et al, 2008;Reed, 1989;Tallal & Piercy, 1973a, 1973bTallal, 1980). However, since the tones also differ spectrally, it might be argued that the difficulty in performing this task represents a deficit in spectral processing.…”

Basic auditory processing and developmental dyslexia in Chinese

“…Interestingly, Chinese children with dyslexia seemed to be as good as typical control children at frequency discrimination, but had significantly poorer lexical tone awareness. Chung et al (2008) also explored the associations between temporal order judgment tasks involving rapidly presented visual or auditory stimuli and Chinese reading abilities. They administered tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement to 26 children with developmental dyslexia, 26 reading level controls and 26 age-matched controls, along with measures of reading, rapid naming, and phonological awareness.…”

Deficits in Processing Characters in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia: Preliminary Results From Event-related Potentials and Time Frequency Analyses

“…An extensive review of the related literature by Farmer and Klein (1995) has led to the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is strongly linked to a general deficit in speed of processing (SOP) in both visual and auditory modalities. Chinese children with reading disorders have also been found to show poorer performance than chronological age matched (CA) children with normal reading abilities on visual and auditory temporal processing tasks, and a correlation between reading performance and orthographic processing (Cheung et al, 2009;Chung et al, 2008;Ho & Bryant, 1997;Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, & Luan, 2004;Liu, Shu, & Yang, 2009;Siok & Fletcher, 2001). Furthermore, it has been argued that morphological awareness is critical to reading development since Chinese characters represent morphemes, and poor morphological awareness is a core deficit underlying developmental dyslexia in Chinese (Wu, Packard, & Shu, 2009 for review).…”