title: Auditory Stimulus Processing and Task Learning Are Adequate in Dyslexia, but Benefits From Regularities Are Reduced.
abstract: The reading deficit for people with dyslexia is typically associated with linguistic, memory, and perceptual-discrimination difficulties, whose relation to reading impairment is disputed. We proposed that automatic detection and usage of serial sound regularities for individuals with dyslexia is impaired (anchoring deficit hypothesis), leading to the formation of less reliable sound predictions. Agus, Carrión-Castillo, Pressnitzer, and Ramus, (2014) reported seemingly contradictory evidence by showing similar performance by participants with and without dyslexia in a demanding auditory task that contained task-relevant regularities. To carefully assess the sensitivity of participants with dyslexia to regularities of this task, we replicated their study.
  
  
  
  Thirty participants with and 24 without dyslexia performed the replicated task. On each trial, a 1-s noise stimulus was presented. Participants had to decide whether the stimulus contained repetitions (was constructed from a 0.5-s noise segment repeated twice) or not. It is implicit in this structure that some of the stimuli with repetitions were themselves repeated across trials. We measured the ability to detect within-noise repetitions and the sensitivity to cross-trial repetitions of the same noise stimuli.
  
  
  
  We replicated the finding of similar mean performance. However, individuals with dyslexia were less sensitive to the cross-trial repetition of noise stimuli and tended to be more sensitive to repetitions in novel noise stimuli.
  
  
  
  These findings indicate that online auditory processing for individuals with dyslexia is adequate but their implicit retention and usage of sound regularities is indeed impaired.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
authors.forename: Luba
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Daikhin
authors.affiliation: Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
authors.forename: Ofri
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Raviv
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, IsraelEdmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
authors.forename: Merav
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ahissar
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001307:Auditory Perception; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D009622:Noise; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological