Speech perception in children with reading disabilities: Phonetic perception is the problem

Reading disability (RD) is widely accepted as a key obstacle in the development of literacy. Studies show that 15–20% of grade-school students are RD. Many quit high-school and go to jail. We shall show that RD for 8–12 yrs is related to inadequate phonetic identification ability, rooted in pre-school language development. We used two tests (10 thousand responses/child): (1) A 3-interval forced choice procedure (Syllable Confusion Oddball Task: SCO). (2) A single CV/VC presentation task with oral response, to label CV/VC phones (Nonsense Syllable Confusion Matrix: NSCM). The experimental results showed that for the SCO task the 10 RD cohort had, on average 5 times the error compared to the 6 RC reading control (RC) cohort. The errors were highly idiosyncratic, analyzed by logit. (1) RDs have significant speech perception problems, despite normal pure-tone hearing and language ability. (2) When comparing the SCO and NSCM results, our findings are consistent with a reduced ability to label CV/VC sounds presented in random temporal order. This seems consistent with phone memory dysfunction. (3) These conclusions are at odds with previous studies finding no indication of phone identification impairment.Reading disability (RD) is widely accepted as a key obstacle in the development of literacy. Studies show that 15–20% of grade-school students are RD. Many quit high-school and go to jail. We shall show that RD for 8–12 yrs is related to inadequate phonetic identification ability, rooted in pre-school language development. We used two tests (10 thousand responses/child): (1) A 3-interval forced choice procedure (Syllable Confusion Oddball Task: SCO). (2) A single CV/VC presentation task with oral response, to label CV/VC phones (Nonsense Syllable Confusion Matrix: NSCM). The experimental results showed that for the SCO task the 10 RD cohort had, on average 5 times the error compared to the 6 RC reading control (RC) cohort. The errors were highly idiosyncratic, analyzed by logit. (1) RDs have significant speech perception problems, despite normal pure-tone hearing and language ability. (2) When comparing the SCO and NSCM results, our findings are consistent with a reduced ability to label CV/VC sounds pres...