Speech Recognition in Noise by Children with and without Dyslexia: How is it Related to Reading?
Section snippets
What this paper adds?
Two clear trends are apparent across research studies into developmental dyslexia: (1) Children with dyslexia display a variety of deficits beyond just reading problems; and (2) These children appear to have subtle and as-yet unspecified perceptual processing problems that may account for their reading problems and other deficits. This paper adds to our understanding of these issues by examining reading skill and one other deficit commonly found for children with dyslexia: problems recognizing
Participants
Data are presented for 97 children between the ages of 7 years; 10 months and 12 years; 9 months: 46 with diagnoses of dyslexia (DYS) and 51 with typical language and literacy (TYP). We selected this broad age range because we wished to examine whether the nature of deficit was different for younger children, largely in the process of learning to read, and slightly older children, who have typically mastered the skill to a great extent.
Diagnoses of dyslexia were made at either the child’s
Explaining variability in reading performance
The first objective of the statistical analyses was to assess whether phonological deficits explained reading performance for these children. Two measures of phonological awareness had been obtained: final consonant choice and pig Latin. In addition, individual means across these two measures for each child were computed (PAmean). Fig. 2 shows performance for each group on these three separate measures. Mean scores were higher for the older than for the younger children in each reading group
Discussion
The study described here was undertaken to examine potential sources of variability in two problems faced by children with dyslexia, and two hypotheses were examined. First, the possibility was considered that children with dyslexia have spectral processing deficits. If support was obtained for this hypothesis, these deficits could provide a unifying basis for two problems facing children with dyslexia: (1) poor sensitivity to phonological structure, because many acoustic cues to phoneme
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by Research Grant R01 DC-000633 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the National Institutes of Health. The authors thank Taylor Wucinich, Ian Boyle, Meganne Muir, Kierstyn Tietgens, and Karen Worman for their help with subject testing and scoring. The authors thank Donal G. Sinex for his suggestions on an earlier draft.
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