Sentence Context Differentially Modulates Contributions of Fundamental Frequency Contours to Word Recognition in Chinese-Speaking Children With and Without Dyslexia.

Linjun Zhang,Yu Li,Hong Zhou,Hua Shu,Yang Zhang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.598658

Abstract

Previous work has shown that children with dyslexia are impaired in speech recognition in adverse listening conditions. Our study further examined how semantic context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours contribute to word recognition against interfering speech in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Thirty-two children with dyslexia and 35 chronological-age-matched control children were tested on the recognition of words in normal sentences versus wordlist sentences with natural versus flat F0 contours against single-talker interference. The dyslexic children had overall poorer recognition performance than non-dyslexic children. Furthermore, semantic context differentially modulated the effect of F0 contours on the recognition performances of the two groups. Specifically, compared with flat F0 contours, natural F0 contours increased the recognition accuracy of dyslexic children less than non-dyslexic children in the wordlist condition. By contrast, natural F0 contours increased the recognition accuracy of both groups to a similar extent in the sentence condition. These results indicate that access to semantic context improves the effect of natural F0 contours on word recognition in adverse listening conditions by dyslexic children who are more impaired in the use of natural F0 contours during isolated and unrelated word recognition. Our findings have practical implications for communication with dyslexic children when listening conditions are unfavorable.

Highlights

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by difficulties in reading and spelling, speech perception deficits have often been reported in dyslexic individuals, especially under adverse or challenging listening conditions
Our findings showed that intelligibility increased to a greater extent for normal sentence than wordlist sentence presented at various signal-tonoise ratios (SNRs) when F0 patterns changed from flat contours to natural contours
The current study investigated word recognition against singletalker interfering speech by Chinese-speaking children with dyslexia compared with chronological-age-matched controls

Summary

Introduction

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by difficulties in reading and spelling, speech perception deficits have often been reported in dyslexic individuals, especially under adverse or challenging listening conditions. The intelligibility advantage of words in sentences over words in isolation when presented in adverse listening conditions has been confirmed by a number of studies on adults and children without dyslexia (e.g., Dubno et al, 2000; Wang et al, 2013; Jiang et al, 2017). The recognition scores of dyslexic children were lower than those of non-dyslexic children, indicating that speech-in-noise perception in dyslexia is impaired at the sentence level. Knowledge of morphological and syntactic structures is the main linguistic influence on recognition beyond sensory information It remains unclear whether dyslexic and non-dyslexic children differ in their use of semantic context to aid sentence recognition in adverse listening conditions. One might suspect that the speech perception difficulties in dyslexic children at the level of isolated words may be attenuated when the children are tested with sentences in which semantic context is available

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