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Speech perception in dyslexic children: the issue of stop consonants and consonant clusters in Dutch

Patrick Snellings, Aryan van der Leij, Henk Blok and Peter de Jong

University of Amsterdam patrick@educ.uva.nl

Abstract

Fast and accurate perception of speech is a core problem in developmental dyslexia (e.g. Joanisse, Manis & Seidenberg, 2000; Goswami et al., 2002). There has also been a growing body of evidence suggesting that in Dutch there is not just a problem with the perception of stop consonants (for the same problem in English see e.g. Tallal et al., 1996; Tallal, 2000), but also in perceiving consonant clusters (Van der Leij, Smeets & van Daal, 1990, Van der Leij & Van Daal, 1999, 2001; Struiksma, 2003). This paper reports on a study in which 20 dyslexic children, 20 reading age controlled readers and 20 normal reading children with the same chronological age were systematically tested on their speech perception abilities concerning isolated stop consonants and stop consonants within consonant clusters. Students were tested using two auditory processing tasks, which either required discrimination between two similar speech sounds or the detection of specific speech sounds in spoken words. Accuracy and response latencies were recorded. To control for frequency effects, both existing Dutch words and pseudo words were used. In the research literature claims have been made regarding the positive effects of acoustically enhanced speech for children with reading deficits (Stark & Heinz, 1996; Bradlow et al., 1999; for a review see Verhoeven & Segers, in press). The current study identifies the specific problem areas in speech perception for Dutch dyslexics. In addition, its results may guide the development of needs tailored intervention programmes.

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