Speech Perception in Children with Specific Reading Difficulties (Dyslexia)

Many experimental studies over the last two decades have suggested that groups of children who suffer significant delay in reading also show a weakness in phoneme discrimination and identification. In order to look further at the relation between type of reading deficit, auditory acuity, and speech discrimination, a group of 13 children with specific reading difficulty (SRD), 12 chronological-age controls, and 12 reading-age controls were tested on a battery of speech-perceptual, psychoacoustic, and reading tests. A sub-group of children with Specific Reading Difficulty (SRD) were poor at speech discrimination tests, whereas the rest of the SRD group performed within norms. For this sub-group, discrimination performance was particularly poor for consonant contrasts differing in a single feature that was not acoustically salient, and problems were encountered with nasal and fricative contrasts as wells with stop contrasts. These children did not differ from controls in their performance on non-speech psychoacoustic tasks. An evaluation is made of the reported phonemic awareness skills of beginning readers with regard to speech-processing issues which may help in understanding what factors are important in reading development.