Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination…

Purpose: Developmental dyslexia (DD) has mostly been attributed to arise from phonological impairments; however, several theories indicate a temporal processing deficit as the underlying cause of DD. So far, research examined the influence of temporal cues on concurrent speech sound categorization in DD, but effects of temporal information from a…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine how the brains of individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) respond to spoken language tasks that underlie successful language acquisition and processing. Method: During functional near-infrared spectroscopy imaging, CI recipients with hearing impairment (n = 10, mean age: 52.7 ± 17.3 years) and…

Reading disability in children with dyslexia has been proposed to reflect impairment in auditory timing perception. We investigated one aspect of timing perception--"temporal grouping"--as present in prosodic phrase boundaries of natural speech, in age-matched groups of children, ages 6-8 years, with and without dyslexia. Prosodic phrase…

Purpose: To test the effects of 24 hr of sleep deprivation on auditory and linguistic perception and to assess the magnitude of this effect by comparing such performance with that of aging adults on speech perception and with that of dyslexic readers on phonological awareness. Method: Fifty-five sleep-deprived young adults were compared with 29…

The nature of word recognition difficulties in developmental dyslexia is still a topic of controversy. We investigated the contribution of phonological processing deficits and uncertainty to the word recognition difficulties of dyslexic children by mathematical diffusion modeling of visual and auditory lexical decision data. The first study showed…

A central feature of auditory STM is its item-limited processing capacity. We investigated whether auditory STM capacity correlated with regional gray and white matter in the structural MRI images from 74 healthy adults, 40 of whom had a prior diagnosis of developmental dyslexia whereas 34 had no history of any cognitive impairment. Using…

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…

Although developmental dyslexia is often referred to as a cross-modal disturbance, tests of different modalities using the same stimuli are lacking. We compared the performance of 23 children with dyslexia and 42 chronologically matched control readers on reading versus repetition tasks and visual versus auditory lexical decision using the same…

The present study explores the relationship between basic auditory processing of sound rise time, frequency, duration and intensity, phonological skills (onset-rime and tone awareness, sound blending, RAN, and phonological memory) and reading disability in Chinese. A series of psychometric, literacy, phonological, auditory, and character…

Word production difficulties are well documented in dyslexia, whereas the results are mixed for receptive phonological processing. This asymmetry raises the possibility that the core phonological deficit of dyslexia is restricted to output processing stages. The present study investigated whether a group of dyslexics had word level receptive…

Introduction: The perception of syllable stress has not been widely studied in developmental dyslexia, despite strong evidence for auditory rhythmic perceptual difficulties. Here we investigate the hypothesis that perception of sound rise time is related to the perception of syllable stress in adults with developmental dyslexia. Methods: A…

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…

A proportion of children with visual impairments have specific reading difficulties that cannot be easily explained. This article reviews the data on problems with braille reading and interprets them from the framework of the temporal-processing deficit theory of developmental dyslexia.

Background: Previous research has shown a relationship between speech perception and dyslexia in alphabetic writing. In these studies speech perception was measured using phonemes, a prominent feature of alphabetic languages. Given the primary importance of lexical tone in Chinese language processing, we tested the extent to which lexical tone and…