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.
Talcott
Joel B
JB
Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences Research Group, Neurosciences Research Institute, Psychology, 5th Floor Main Building, Aston University, Birmingham, UK. j.b.talcott@aston.ac.uk
Gram
Aashild
A
Van Ingelghem
Mieke
M
Witton
Caroline
C
Stein
John F
JF
Toennessen
Finn Egil
FE
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