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Talk;imaging

Saturday stream 2 Session 11.35 - 12.50 Length 25 minutes

Auditory processing of duration in Finnish dyslexic adults and their children

U. Richardson ,, P. H. T. Leppanen ,, M. Leiwo , H. Lyytinen ,

(1) Department of Finnish, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, (2) Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, (3) Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, 40351 Jyväskylä, Finland, (4) Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 07102, USA U.Richardson@ich.ucl.ac.uk

Abstract

As yet relatively little is known of the earliest signs of dyslexia. First, we present evidence showing that the speech perception of 6 month old infants from dyslexic families differs significantly from that of infants from control families with normal reading parents; They needed a significantly longer duration in order to categorize speech sounds as long. The same difference appeared in a study of their dyslexic parents. This study shows that differences in categorizing speech sounds according to duration, which is crucial to intelligibility in Finnish, is both an early indicator of risk for dyslexia in infants and a persistent feature of dyslexia. Secondly, we investigated if there is a difference between auditory processing and speech perception in the same children when they are six and half years of age. These results are discussed in terms of proposed inferior auditory temporal processing in dyslexic individuals.