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Processing of Suprasegmental Features of Acoustic Signal in Dyslexic Children

Ulla Richardson , Jennifer Thomson and Usha Goswami

(1) University of Cambridge (2) University College London uar21@cam.ac.uk

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is characterised by deficient phonological skills. To investigate the possible lower-level causes, we studied the abilities of dyslexic children to process the suprasegmental level of acoustic signal. There is a growing body of evidence that dyslexics may have difficulties in processing the temporal information of speech as well as of simple auditory signals. Furthermore, previous studies have shown that dyslexic children have difficulty in the detection of amplitude modulation. Thus, we focused our investigation on the various aspects of processing durational information and information on the amplitude of the auditory signal. Our hypothesis was that dyslexic children and matched chronological age control children would be differentially sensitive to these suprasegmental aspects in particular when simultaneous attention needs to be paid to two different suprasegmental features. In the English cohort tested (N=59), the processing of duration in 9-year old dyslexic children was significantly poorer than in age-matched normally-reading controls. The groups did not differ in perceiving the intensity of the acoustic stimuli. However, the groups differed significantly in processing the rise times of amplitude modulations. Furthermore, significant relationships were found between processing of both duration and rise-times, and the phonological processing measures (s-d judgement task and segmentation tasks), reading and spelling. Explanations for these findings are discussed and in particularly a possible causal explanation dependent of complex suprasegmental prossessing and the onset-rime representation of syllables is suggested.

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