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Phonological processing in developmental dyslexia: testing the sub-lexical (input) phonological representations

Gayaneh Szenkovits and Franck Ramus

LSCP, Paris gayaneh.szen@netcourrier.com

Abstract

The present study aims at a more detailed understanding of the phonological deficit in dyslexia. We asked whether the deficit is in output or input representations, and whether its locus is at the lexical or sub-lexical level. Dyslexics' impaired performance on non-word span and non-word repetition suggests that sub-lexical representations are deficient. We hypothesise that speech production itself is not significantly impaired; the deficit can thus be isolated in the perceptual modality. We tested these two hypotheses (input and sub-lexical locus) in four conditions. We investigated the sub-lexical phonological representation of French dyslexic adults by studying their performance in a non-word discrimination paradigm, with length increased incrementally up to 9 syllables. The auditorily presented pairs of non-words were pronounced by two different speakers (male and female) and separated with a tone, to prevent subjects from engaging echoic auditory memory. Subjects had to determine whether the non-words of a pair were the same or different. In the first condition the non-words differed by one distinctive feature of a consonant (either a fricative (z, s, Z, S) or a plosive (d, t, g, k)). In the second condition the non-words differed by the order of two consonants. In the third condition we studied lexical effects by using non-words that contained parts of real words. In the fourth condition, we included consonant clusters that are poorly discriminated by French speakers because of French phonotactic constraints, e.g. [dl] is perceived as [gl]. One possible prediction is that dyslexics, relying more on phonetic information than phonological knowledge, might perform better than controls in this latter condition. The results will be interpreted within an information-processing model of phonology and lexical access.

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