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

doi:10.1006/jecp.1996.2343

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Volume 64, Issue 2, February 1997, Pages 199-231

https://doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1996.2343 Get rights and content

Abstract

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/–/∳a/); (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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Poor phonological awareness is associated with greater risk for reading disability. The underlying neural mechanism of such association may lie in the brain processing of phonological information. Lower amplitude of auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) has been associated with poor phonological awareness and with the presence of reading disability. The current study recorded auditory MMN to phoneme and lexical tone contrast with odd-ball paradigm and examined whether auditory MMN mediated the associations between phonological awareness and character reading ability through a three-year longitudinal study in 78 native Mandarin-speaking kindergarten children. Hierarchical linear regression and mediation analyses showed that the effect of phoneme awareness on the character reading ability was mediated by the phonemic MMN in young Chinese children. Findings underscore the key role of phonemic MMN as the underlying neurodevelopmental mechanism linking phoneme awareness and reading ability.
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Citation Excerpt :
Regarding the atypical development of phonological representations for words that characterise older children once they are diagnosed with dyslexia, the most commonly accepted hypothesis is that these phonological representations are somehow “noisy” or “imprecise” (Snowling, 2000; Swan & Goswami, 1997). As explained in detail by Ramus and Szenkovits (2008), the general idea concerning “noisy” representations is that a dyslexic child’s neural representations of the speech signal are somehow fuzzier, for example having a lower resolution than they should, or preserving too many acoustic or allophonic details (Adlard & Hazan, 1998; Bogliotti, Serniclaes, Messaoud-Galusi, & Sprenger-Charolles, 2008; Elbro, Borstrøm, & Petersen, 1998; Manis et al., 1997; Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, & Brady, 1997; Serniclaes & Seck, 2018; Serniclaes, Van Heghe, Mousty, Carré, & Sprenger-Charolles, 2004; Snowling, 2000). Other terms used in the literature to describe dyslexic children’s phonological representations are “imprecise” or “under-specified”.
The amplitude envelope of speech carries crucial low-frequency acoustic information that assists linguistic decoding. The sensory-neural Temporal Sampling (TS) theory of developmental dyslexia proposes atypical encoding of speech envelope information < 10 Hz, leading to atypical phonological representations. Here a backward linear TRF model and story listening were employed to estimate the speech information encoded in the electroencephalogram in the canonical delta, theta and alpha bands by 9-year-old children with and without dyslexia. TRF decoding accuracy provided an estimate of how faithfully the children’s brains encoded low-frequency envelope information. Between-group analyses showed that the children with dyslexia exhibited impaired reconstruction of speech information in the delta band. However, when the quality of speech encoding for each child was estimated using child-by-child decoding models, then the dyslexic children did not differ from controls. This suggests that children with dyslexia encode neither “noisy” nor “normal” representations of the speech signal, but different representations.
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Deficiencies in discriminating and identifying speech sounds have been widely attested in individuals with dyslexia as well as in young children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia. A speech perception deficit has been hypothesized to be causally related to reading and spelling difficulties. So far, however, early speech perception of FR infants has not been assessed at different ages within a single experimental design. Furthermore, a combination of group- and individual-based analyses has not been made. In this cross-sectional study, vowel discrimination of 6-, 8-, and 10-month-old Dutch FR infants and their nonrisk (no-FR) peers was assessed. Infants (N = 196) were tested on a native English /aː/–/eː/ and non-native English /ɛ/–/æ/ contrast using a hybrid visual habituation paradigm. Frequentist analyses were used to interpret group differences. Bayesian hierarchical modeling was used to classify individuals as speech sound discriminators. FR and no-FR infants discriminated the native contrast at all ages. However, individual classification of the no-FR infants suggests improved discrimination with age, but not for the FR infants. No-FR infants discriminated the non-native contrast at 6 and 10 months, but not at 8 months. FR infants did not show evidence of discriminating the contrast at any of the ages, with 0% being classified as discriminators. The group- and individual-based data are complementary and together point toward speech perception differences between the groups. The findings also indicate that conducting individual analyses on hybrid visual habituation outcomes is possible. These outcomes form a fruitful avenue for gaining more understanding of development, group differences, and prospective relationships.
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Speech comprehension has been proposed to critically rely on oscillatory cortical tracking, that is, phase alignment of neural oscillations to the slow temporal modulations (envelope) of speech. Speech-brain entrainment is readjusted over time as transient events (edges) in speech lead to speech-brain phase realignment. Auditory behavioral research suggests that phonological deficits in dyslexia are linked to difficulty in discriminating speech edges. Importantly, research to date has not specifically examined neural responses to speech edges in dyslexia. In the present study, we used MEG to record brain activity from normal and dyslexic readers while they listened to speech. We computed phase locking values (PLVs) to evaluate phase entrainment between neural oscillations and the speech envelope time-locked to edge onsets. In both groups, we observed that edge onsets induced phase resets in the auditory oscillations tracking speech, thereby enhancing their entrainment to speech. Importantly, dyslexic readers showed weaker PLVs compared to normal readers in left auditory regions from ~.15 sec to ~.65 sec after edge onset. Our results indicate that the neural mechanism that adapts cortical entrainment to the speech envelope is impaired in dyslexia. These findings here are consistent with the temporal sampling theory of developmental dyslexia.
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Citation Excerpt :
Meanwhile, the theory not only emphasizes insufficient phonological awareness but also the inadequate mastery of the knowledge of the acoustic structure of speech (Schulte-Körne and Bruder, 2010). Speech perception is regarded as a prerequisite for phonological processing, and individuals with dyslexia experience difficulties in speech perception (Mody et al., 1997; Noordenbos and Serniclaes, 2015; Schulte-Körne et al., 2001). A deficit in speech perception may result in an imprecise phonological representation, leading to an impairment in phonological processing (Schulte-Körne et al., 1998).
Several previous studies have used mismatch negativity (MMN) to examine the auditory processing deficit in individuals with dyslexia. However, researchers have not clearly determined whether the deficit is general or specific and how it potentially changes with age. Meta-analysis was adopted to quantitatively identify the auditory processing deficit in individuals with dyslexia. By analysing 81 results within 25 publications that employed passive oddball paradigms to explore auditory processing in individuals with dyslexia, we identified that MMN impairment in auditory processing of speech was observed in children (Cohen’s d = 0.296) and adults with dyslexia (Cohen’s d = 0.486). Besides, adults with dyslexia showed atypical auditory processing of non-speech (Cohen’s d = 0.409), which appeared to be related to the types of stimuli. Based on these findings, for individuals with dyslexia, the auditory processing deficit in speech will persist into adulthood, and the auditory processing deficit is general in adults with dyslexia. Because few studies used appropriate non-speech stimuli to examine the auditory processing in children with dyslexia, future studies should focus more on this area.

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¹: Now at ENST, Dept. Signal, Paris, France.

²: Also at the University of Rhode Island.

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

Abstract

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