Bases of reading impairment in speech perception: A deficit in rate of auditory processing or in phonological coding?
Item
-
Title
-
Bases of reading impairment in speech perception: A deficit in rate of auditory processing or in phonological coding?
-
Identifier
-
AAI9325132
-
identifier
-
9325132
-
Creator
-
Mody, Maria.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Michael Studdert-Kennedy
-
Date
-
1993
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Health Sciences, Speech Pathology | Psychology, Experimental
-
Abstract
-
Previous research has suggested that lack of phonological awareness in reading impaired children may arise from a more basic deficit in speech perception. The current study investigated two possible sources for such a deficit. First, poor readers may suffer from a generally impaired rate of auditory processing, indexed, for example, by their apparent difficulties in processing the rapid spectral changes typical of formant transitions at the onset of stop-consonant vowel syllables, as in /ba/ and /da/. Alternatively, poor readers may suffer from a deficit in phonological coding: their auditory perception may be normal, but they have difficulty deriving phonological segments from the auditory stream. Forty second-grade good and poor readers (n = 20 in each group), mean age 8.0 years, matched on verbal and performance I.Q., were selected on the basis of their reading scores on the Woodcock Johnson Reading Mastery Test and their performance on temporal order judgments (TOJ) of /ba/-/da/, presented at short interstimulus intervals (ISI) (100, 50, 10 ms). Good readers were reading at least five months ahead of grade level, and made no errors on the TOJ task; poor readers were reading at least five months behind grade level, and had a minimum of three errors on the TOJ task (group mean = 7.4 errors out of 36 trials). However, poor readers had no difficulty with the TOJ task when /ba/ and /da/ were presented in more easily discriminable pairs, as in /ba/-/sa/ and /da/-/{dollar}f{dollar}a/, so that their difficulties were evidently not intrinsic to the acoustic structure of /ba/ and /da/, but depended on the context of their presentation. Moreover, the two groups did not differ significantly in their abilities either to discriminate sinewave analogs of the second and third formants of /ba/ and /da/, or to identify members of a synthetic /seI-steI/ continuum, where a brief (40 ms) F{dollar}\sb1{dollar} vocalic transition was a critical cue to the stop consonant. In short, poor readers did not differ from good readers in their ability to process rapid spectral changes. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that reading impaired children suffer from a deficit in phonological coding.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
