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Clarifying the Speech Perception Deficits of Dyslexic Children

Overview

This project will investigate how children with specific reading difficulties (dyslexia) and those who are reading normally perceive the sounds of speech. To decode speech, listeners need to be able to ignore ‘irrelevant’ variation in the speech signal that is linked to differences in speaker, speaking style, accent, etc. It is claimed that children with SRD are more sensitive to these variations than other children. We will check this claim using tests in which we can manipulate specific acoustic patterns within the word. We will then test children’s perception of many different consonants to try and better understand what makes some more difficult to identify than others. Finally, we will test children’s ability to adapt to different speakers and speaking styles.
The key goals of the project are:

1. to evaluate the claim that children with SRD are too sensitive to irrelevant phonetic variation
2. to evaluate whether these children’s performance on very analytic ‘categorisation’ tasks is related to their perception of speech sounds and words in natural listening conditions
3. to evaluate whether sensitivity to irrelevant phonetic variation is linked to difficulties in attuning to different speakers and speaking styles

Objectives

Our research questions are as follows:

1. Do children with SRD show greater sensitivity to irrelevant phonetic variation in phoneme categorisation tasks?
2. Do phoneme categorisation tasks predict performance in more naturalistic consonant identification and discrimination tasks?
3. How do children with SRD deal with phonetic variation linked to speaker and speaking rate?
4. Are phoneme categorisation and normalization abilities in children with SRD correlated with their phonological awareness?