A Critique of Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, and Brady's "Speech Perception Deficits in Poor Readers

Abstract

A 1997 article by Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, and Brady claimed that their studies constituted a critical test of two hypotheses concerning students with reading impairment: (a) that they experience speech-specific failure in phonological representation, and (b) they display general deficits in auditory temporal processing. From these studies, the authors concluded that their findings were consistent with the first hypothesis but were not in agreement with the second. A critical analysis of the Mody et al. article leads to the conclusion that it makes no contribution to that debate because (a) the children in the Poor reading group did not meet the accepted reading-impairment criterion of being delayed by at least 1 year in their reading skills, (b) there were severe violations of statistical assumptions, and (c) their conclusions were based on the failure to find significant differences, thus compelling them to accept the null hypothesis as proven, in the absence of any statistical power analysis.