The relationship between auditory temporal processing, phonemic awareness, and reading disability

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Abstract

Recent research suggests an auditory temporal deficit as a possible contributing factor to poor phonemic awareness skills. This study investigated the relationship between auditory temporal processing of nonspeech sounds and phonological awareness ability in children with a reading disability, aged 8–12 years, using Tallal’s tone-order judgement task. Normal performance on the tone-order task was established for 36 normal readers. Forty-two children with developmental reading disability were then subdivided by their performance on the tone-order task. Average and poor tone-order subgroups were then compared on their ability to process speech sounds and visual symbols, and on phonological awareness and reading. The presence of a tone-order deficit did not relate to performance on the order processing of speech sounds, to poorer phonological awareness or to more severe reading difficulties. In particular, there was no evidence of a group by interstimulus interval interaction, as previously described in the literature, and thus little support for a general auditory temporal processing difficulty as an underlying problem in poor readers. In this study, deficient order judgement on a nonverbal auditory temporal order task (tone task) did not underlie phonological awareness or reading difficulties.

Section snippets

Participants

Seventy-eight children aged between 8 and 12 years were included in the study: 42 children with reading difficulty and 36 normally reading control children. Reading disabled children included in the sample were selected on an availability basis from referrals for assessment of literacy learning difficulties to the Psychology Department of the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. Criteria for inclusion were as follows: Reading Accuracy (Neale Analysis of Reading Revised) more than 18

Comparison of the reading disabled group and the control group on the tone-order task

The means for response time and percentage error for the reading disabled group and the control group on the tone-order task, as a function of ISI, are presented in Fig. 1. Repeated measures analysis of variance showed that for response time there were main effects for both group, F(1,76)=4.75,p<.05, and ISI, F(4,304)=20.87,p<.001. The control group processed the tone pairs more quickly than the reading disabled group, and both groups took longer to process the tone pairs at shorter ISIs.

Discussion

The results of this study have confirmed that a subset of reading disabled children have significant difficulty in reproducing the order of briefly presented complex tone pairs. However, the presence of a tone-ordering deficit was not associated with poorer ordering of CV syllables. Thus, a link between the difficulty of processing nonspeech and speech sounds, which could have provided a mechanism for the defective perception of briefly presented phonemic information was not established.

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