Auditory temporal processing and dyslexia in an orthographically consistent language.

George K Georgiou, Athanassios Protopapas, Timothy C Papadopoulos, Christos Skaloumbakas, Rauno Parrila
Author Information
  1. George K Georgiou: University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.

Abstract

We examined two hypotheses relating auditory processing to dyslexia in Greek, an orthographically consistent language. Study I examined the "P-center" or "beat detection" hypothesis (Goswami et al., 2002) in a sample of Grade 6 dyslexics, Grade 6 chronological age (CA) controls, and Grade 4 reading age (RA) controls. Study II examined the "temporal processing," or "rapid auditory processing" hypothesis (Tallal, 1980) in a sample of Grade 7 dyslexics, CA controls, and in two groups of CA matched children with low frequency discrimination or low tone sequencing performance. Both studies indicate that (a) as a group, dyslexic children did not perform significantly worse on auditory processing measures than the control groups; (b) measures of auditory processing mostly did not account for unique amount of variance in phonological processing, reading, or spelling; and (c) at an individual level of analysis, some of the dyslexic children experienced auditory temporal processing deficits. Implications on the importance of auditory processing in reading in orthographically consistent languages are discussed.

MeSH Term

Auditory Perception
Child
Dyslexia
Educational Status
Female
Greece
Humans
Intelligence
Intelligence Tests
Language
Male
Neuropsychological Tests
Phonetics
Pitch Discrimination
Reaction Time
Reading
Reference Standards
Speech Perception