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We examined the effects of presentation rate on speech perception in noise and its relation to reading in 117 typically developing (TD) children and 10 children with reading difficulties (RD) in Japan. Responses in a speech perception task were measured for speed, accuracy, and stability in two conditions that varied stimulus presentation rate: high rate and same rate conditions. TD children exhibited significantly more stable responses in the high rate condition than they did in the same rate condition. Multiple regression analyses indicated that response stability in the high rate condition accounted for a unique amount of variance in reading and mora deletion. As a group, children with RD performed less accurately than did TD children in the high rate condition, but not in the same rate condition. Findings suggest that the dependence of speech perception on stimulus context relates to reading proficiency or difficulty in Japanese children. The influences of phonology and orthography of language on the relationships between speech perception and reading are discussed.

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Two reading time components, reading latency (RL) and articulation time (AT), were explored in word and nonword reading in a boy (P1) exhibiting reading di culty characterized by profound phonological de cits. In Experiment 1, the reading time components were longitudinally assessed from Grades 1 to 5. During the period from Grades 1 to 3, P1's persistent reading speed de cits had di erent causes: delayed RL in word reading and longer AT in nonword reading. When he was in Grade 5, however, the most signi cant de cit was found in RL for nonword reading. In Experiment 2, P1's reading strategies for word and nonword reading were examined, focusing on word-length e ects on the reading time components. e results indicated that reading de cits were found only in his RL, regardless of word length or meaningfulness of stimuli, indicating that P1 had developed and applied his own reading strategy to compensate for his reading problem. On the basis of the results of the experiments, the applicability and usefulness of the reading time components were discussed.Key Words: reading di culties, reading time components, reading strategy IntroductionReading is an important sociocultural ability for children as it can facilitate access to relevant information and, consequently, better economic possibilities. Reading di culties (RDs), or dyslexia that cannot be accounted for by general intellectual ability, sensory problems, or inadequate instruction (Lyon, Shaywitz, & Shaywitz, 2003) have been characterized in both cognitive and neurobiological terms (Ramus, 2003(Ramus, , 2004. A number of studies have examined the causal factors of RDs, and the well-established theories cite phonological de cits (Snowling, 2000;Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon, 2004;Wolf & Bowers, 1999) and visual processing de cits (Lobier, Zoubrinetzky, & Valdois, 2012;Stein, 2001). Wolf and Bowers (1999) proposed the double-de cit hypothesis (DDH) in which they argued that two core processes, phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN), were causally related to the RDs. e DDH posits four groups of readers: No-de cit readers perform in the average and above average range on both PA and RAN; single-de cit readers form two groups, those with a phonological de cit (PD) and those who have poor naming speed (NSD); and double-de cit (DD) readers have both PA and RAN de cits and have the most severe reading problems.It is widely acknowledged that the prevalence of RDs and their clinical manifestations vary with the nature of the language in which children learn (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Compared with RDs in languages with inconsistent orthographies, such as English and French, RDs in languages with consistent orthographies, such as Italian, German, and Spanish are characterized by marked reading-speed de cits (Wimmer, 1993;Zoccolotti, De Luca, Di Pace, Judica, Orlandi, & Spinelli, 1999). In inconsistent orthographies, reading errors are prevalent, whereas in consistent orthographies, reading errors are few; therefore, the primary feature ...