Speech, reading, and writing are the basic forms of linguistic communication. Therefore, it is very important to diagnose any problems with them as early and completely as possible, particularly in children with special needs. One of the methods that focuses primarily on the diagnosis and therapy of such learning difficulties is the one developed…

Background: Temporal information processing (TIP) underlies many aspects of cognitive functions like language, motor control, learning, memory, attention, etc. Millisecond timing may be assessed by sequencing abilities, e.g. the perception of event order. It may be measured with auditory temporal-order-threshold (TOT), i.e. a minimum time gap…

Purpose: The claim that speech perception abilities are impaired in dyslexia was investigated in a group of 62 children with dyslexia and 51 average readers matched in age. Method: To test whether there was robust evidence of speech perception deficits in children with dyslexia, speech perception in noise and quiet was measured using 8 different…

The present study focuses on examining the hypothesis that auditory temporal perception deficit is a basic cause for reading disabilities among dyslexics. This hypothesis maintains that reading impairment is caused by a fundamental perceptual deficit in processing rapid auditory or visual stimuli. Since the auditory perception involves a number of…

We examined categorical speech perception in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or Specific Language Impairment (SLI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Stimuli consisted of synthetic speech tokens in which place of articulation varied from "b" to "d". Children were tested on categorization, categorization in noise, and…

Two studies explored the relationship between rapid auditory processing and phonological processing in 82 typical children and compared 17 children with dyslexia to controls. Children with dyslexia performed at a level similar to reading-age controls on auditory processing but obtained scores that were significantly below those of the…

In this study, eight young adolescents with dyslexia were compared to age-matched controls on a number of speech and non-speech auditory tasks. Children with dyslexia had significantly higher thresholds in backward masking for bandpass noise than did control participants, but differed in no other way. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Perceptual discrimination between speech sounds belonging to different phoneme categories is better than that between sounds falling within the same category. This property, known as ''categorical perception,'' is weaker in children affected by dyslexia. Categorical perception develops from the predispositions of newborns for discriminating all…

This study examined the abilities of 18 adults with familial dyslexia to use steady state, dynamic, and temporal cues in synthetic speech continua. Although subjects were able to label and discriminate the continua, they did not necessarily use acoustic cues in the same manner as did normal readers, and their overall performance was less accurate.…

Significant differences between dyslexic children and controls were found in identification and discrimination of synthesized voiced stop consonants differing in place of articulation. Results suggest an inconsistency in the dyslexics' phonetic classification of auditory cues. A significant relationship was found between reading level and speech…

New knowledge of the perceptual, discriminative, and memory capabilities of very young infants has opened the door to further evaluation of these abilities in infants who have risk factors for cognitive impairments. A neurophysiologic technique that has been very useful in this regard is the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). The…