Adults with dyslexia are impaired in categorizing speech and nonspeech sounds on the basis of temporal cues

作者：Vandermosten Maaike^*; Boets Bart; Luts Heleen; Poelmans Hanne; Golestani Narly; Wouters Jan; Ghesquiere Pol

来源：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010, 107(23): 10389-10394.

DOI：10.1073/pnas.0912858107

• auditory processing
• categorical perception
• speech perception

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by severe reading and spelling difficulties that are persistent and resistant to the usual didactic measures and remedial efforts. It is well established that a major cause of these problems lies in poorly specified representations of speech sounds. One hypothesis states that this phonological deficit results from a more fundamental deficit in auditory processing. Despite substantial research effort, the specific nature of these auditory problems remains debated. A first controversy concerns the speech specificity of the auditory processing problems: Can they be reduced to more basic auditory processing, or are they specific to the perception of speech sounds? A second topic of debate concerns the extent to which the auditory problems are specific to the processing of rapidly changing temporal information or whether they encompass a broader range of complex spectro-temporal processing. By applying a balanced design with stimuli that were adequately controlled for acoustic complexity, we show that adults with dyslexia are specifically impaired at categorizing speech and nonspeech sounds that differ in terms of rapidly changing acoustic cues (i.e., temporal cues), but that they perform adequately when categorizing steady-state speech and nonspeech sounds. Thus, we show that individuals with dyslexia have an auditory temporal processing deficit that is not speech-specific.

• 出版日期2010-6-8