Abstract
Chinese lexical tones determine word meaning and are crucial in reading development. Reduced tone awareness is widely reported in children with reading difficulties (RD). Lexical-tone processing requires sensitivity to frequency-modulated sound changes. The present study investigates whether reduced tone awareness in children with RD is reflected in basic auditory processing and the level at which the breakdown occurs. Magnetoencephalographic techniques and an oddball paradigm were used to elicit auditory-related neural responses. Five frequency sweep conditions were established to mirror the frequency fluctuation in Chinese lexical tones, including one standard (level) sweep and four deviant sweeps (fast-up, fast-down, slow-up, and slow-down). A total of 14 Chinese-speaking children aged 9–12 years with RD and 13 age-matched typically developing children were recruited. The participants completed a magnetoencephalographic data acquisition session, during which they watched a silent cartoon and the auditory stimuli were presented in a pseudorandomized order. The results revealed that the significant between-group difference was caused by differences in the level of auditory sensory processing, reflected by the P1m component elicited by the slow-up frequency sweep. This finding indicated that auditory sensory processing was affected by both the duration and the direction of a frequency sweep. Sensitivity to changes in duration and frequency is crucial for the processing of suprasegmental features. Therefore, this sensory deficit might be associated with difficulties discriminating two tones with an upward frequency contour in Chinese.
Highlights
Reading development is associated with phonological awareness—the ability to identify and manipulate the components of speech sound (National Reading Panel, 2000; Kirby et al, 2003)
The results of the permutation tests revealed that the four deviant FM sweep conditions elicited Event-Related Fields (ERFs) that were significantly different from the standard condition
This study explored the differences in basic auditory processing between Chinese-speaking children with and without reading difficulties (RD)
Summary
Reading development is associated with phonological awareness—the ability to identify and manipulate the components of speech sound (National Reading Panel, 2000; Kirby et al, 2003). A possible explanation for this deficit is that difficulties in basic auditory processing lead to inaccurate speech sound. FM sound processing has received particular attention in research on basic auditory processing deficits in Chinese-speaking children with RD because of the close association between Chinese lexical tones and FM sound (Meng et al, 2005; Wang et al, 2019). Despite that behavioral evidence has reported reduced performance on the FM sound processing (Wang et al, 2019), it remains unclear how the deficit is reflected in neural response.
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