Impaired sensitivity to dynamic stimuli in poor readers of a regular orthography.
The mappings from grapheme to phoneme are much less consistent in English than they are for most other languages. Therefore, the differences found between English-speaking dyslexics and controls on sensory measures of temporal processing might be related more to the irregularities of English orthography than to a general deficit affecting reading ability in all languages. However, here we show that poor readers of Norwegian, a language with a relatively regular orthography, are less sensitive than controls to dynamic visual and auditory stimuli. Consistent with results from previous studies of English-readers, detection thresholds for visual motion and auditory frequency modulation (FM) were significantly higher in 19 poor readers of Norwegian compared to 22 control readers of the same age. Over two-thirds (68.4%) of the children identified as poor readers were less sensitive than controls to either or both of the visual coherent motion or auditory 2Hz FM stimuli.
Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences Research Group, Neurosciences Research Institute, Psychology, 5th Floor Main Building, Aston University, Birmingham, UK. j.b.talcott@aston.ac.uk
Joel B
JB
Talcott
Aashild
A
Gram
Mieke
M
Van Ingelghem
Caroline
C
Witton
John F
JF
Stein
Finn Egil
FE
Toennessen
D000293:Adolescent; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D016002:Discriminant Analysis; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011594:Psychometrics; D011601:Psychophysics; D011932:Reading; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology