Speech Perception Deficits in Poor Readers: Auditory Processing or Phonological Coding?

Author(s)

Maria Mody, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, and Susan Brady

Journal Reference:(s)

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 64, 199–231 (1997)

Abstract:(s)

Poor readers are inferior to normal-reading peers in aspects of speech perception. Two hypotheses have been proposed to account for their deficits:

(i) a speech-specific failure in phonological representation and

(ii) a general deficit in auditory ‘‘temporal processing,’’ such that they cannot easily perceive the rapid spectral changes of formant transitions at the onset of stop-vowel syllables.

To test these hypotheses, two groups of second-grade children (20 ‘‘good readers,’’ 20 ‘‘poor readers’’), matched for age and intelligence, were selected to differ significantly on a /ba/–/da/ temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, said to be diagnostic of a temporal processing deficit. Three experiments then showed that the groups did not differ in:

(i) TOJ when /ba/ and /da/ were paired with more easily discriminated syllables (/ba/–/sa/, /da/–/Sa/);

(ii) discriminating nonspeech sine wave analogs of the second and third formants of /ba/ and /da/;

(iii) sensitivity to brief transitional cues varying along a synthetic speech

continuum. Thus, poor readers’ difficulties with /ba/–/da/ reflected perceptual confusion between phonetically similar, though phonologically contrastive, syllables rather than difficulty in perceiving rapid spectral changes. The results are consistent with a speech-specific, not a general auditory, deficit.

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