Sensorimotor Control of Speech and Children’s Reading Ability

Mark R Van Den Bunt,Margriet A Groen,Steve Frost,Airey Lau,Jonathan L Preston,Vincent L Gracco,Kenneth R Pugh,Ludo T W Verhoeven

doi:10.1080/10888438.2018.1491583

Mark R Van Den Bunt, Margriet A Groen + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2018.1491583

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Abstract

ABSTRACTStudies of the role of phonological representations in learning to read have almost exclusively focused on speech perception. In the current study, we examined links between sensorimotor control of speech, reading, and reading-related abilities. We studied two languages, English and Dutch, which vary in the regularity of their spelling-to-sound mappings. There were 236 American and Dutch children, 4 to 8 years old, who performed an altered auditory feedback task in which the first formant of the /ɛ/ vowel was altered. A stronger response to altered feedback for literate relative to preliterate children was observed, and this was particularly the case for the Dutch children. Moreover, the magnitude of the responses was related to precursors of reading in preliterate children and to reading skill in literate children. We propose that these findings could be related to changes in children’s speech production skills that facilitate the integration of orthographic and phonemic information.

Highlights

Reading skill builds on speech and language skills (Mattingly, 1972), during the early stages of reading development
Studies on developmental dyslexia often report that impaired phonological representations underlie reading deficiencies, but the nature of the phonological impairment is under debate (Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008)
To further understand the role of phonological representations in reading, speech perception and speech production should be taken into account

Summary

Introduction

Reading skill builds on speech and language skills (Mattingly, 1972), during the early stages of reading development. We examined the sensorimotor control of speech using an altered auditory feedback paradigm to probe the quality of phonological representations in adults (Van Den Bunt et al, 2017). We argued that this sensorimotor control of speech is crucially involved in the adequate development of phonological representations (Guenther et al, 2006; Hickok et al, 2011) and directly reflects phonological processes, in contrast to measures such as phonological awareness, that entail metalinguistic processing (Van Den Bunt et al, 2017). This study showed that the response to altered auditory feedback distinguishes typical and dyslexic adult readers, an important follow-up question is how the sensorimotor control of speech is related to individual differences in reading in children. Are the relations between the response to altered feedback and reading different between languages with contrasting orthographiesEnglish and Dutch? On the assumption that a core aspect of all orthographies entails mapping orthographic forms to the systems supporting phonology (Rueckl et al, 2015) we anticipate relations between the sensorimotor control of speech and reading in both languages; the strength of the relation may be stronger for Dutch with its more transparent orthography, due to the greater covariance between spoken and written forms

Participants

Results

Discussion

Slope after-effect phase