Speech perception in children with reading disabilities: Phonetic perception is the problem

Abstract

Reading disability (RD) is widely accepted as a key obstacle in the development of literacy. Studies show that 15–20% of grade-school students are RD. Many quit high-school and go to jail. We shall show that RD for 8–12 yrs is related to inadequate phonetic identification ability, rooted in pre-school language development. We used two tests (10 thousand responses/child): (1) A 3-interval forced choice procedure (Syllable Confusion Oddball Task: SCO). (2) A single CV/VC presentation task with oral response, to label CV/VC phones (Nonsense Syllable Confusion Matrix: NSCM). The experimental results showed that for the SCO task the 10 RD cohort had, on average 5 times the error compared to the 6 RC reading control (RC) cohort. The errors were highly idiosyncratic, analyzed by logit. (1) RDs have significant speech perception problems, despite normal pure-tone hearing and language ability. (2) When comparing the SCO and NSCM results, our findings are consistent with a reduced ability to label CV/VC sounds presented in random temporal order. This seems consistent with phone memory dysfunction. (3) These conclusions are at odds with previous studies finding no indication of phone identification impairment.