Longitudinal relationships between speech perception, phonological skills and reading in children at high‐risk of dyslexia

Abstract

Speech perception deficits are commonly reported in dyslexia but longitudinal evidence that poor speech perception compromises learning to read is scant. We assessed the hypothesis that phonological skills, specifically phoneme awareness and RAN, mediate the relationship between speech perception and reading. We assessed longitudinal predictive relationships between categorical speech perception, phoneme awareness, RAN, language, attention and reading at ages 5½ and 6½ years in 237 children many of whom were at high risk of reading difficulties. Speech perception at 5½ years correlated with language, attention, phoneme awareness and RAN concurrently and was a predictor of reading at 6½ years. There was no significant indirect effect of speech perception on reading via phoneme awareness, suggesting that its effects are separable from those of phoneme awareness. Children classified with dyslexia at 8 years had poorer speech perception than age-controls at 5½ years and children with language disorders (with or without dyslexia) had more severe difficulties with both speech perception and attention control. Categorical speech perception tasks tap factors extraneous to perception, including decision-making skills. Further longitudinal studies are needed to unravel the complex relationships between categorical speech perception tasks and measures of reading and language and attention.

The Prevalence of Dyslexia in Primary School Children and Their Chinese Literacy Assessment in Shantou, China

“…Besides, evidence from an eight-year, longitudinal study has suggested that phonological awareness provides the basis for the development of morphological awareness in Chinese, which is a better indicator for predicting children’s future reading development [ 40 ]. In addition, studies have revealed that rapid automatized naming deficits play an important role in predicting the incidence of dyslexia [ 35 , 37 ], which is consistent with our results. Rapid automatic naming was strongly associated with early childhood reading skills, and it might be related to speech processing ability and auditory processing impairment.…”

“…Impairment of cognitive–linguistic skills is closely related to the occurrence of dyslexia, but there has been no conclusive debate on which kind of cognitive–linguistic skill is the core deficit of Chinese dyslexia. It has been well-established that the deficit of phonological awareness is a causal risk factor for dyslexia for alphabetic languages [ 36 , 37 , 38 ]. However, several findings in Hong Kong have indicated that the deficit of morphological awareness was a relatively strong correlate of dyslexia in Chinese, but phonological awareness was not [ 39 ].…”

Lexical and grammatical development in children at family risk of dyslexia from early childhood to school entry: a cross-lagged analysis

“…Therefore, these results illustrate how learning at one level of analysis could potentially affect learning downstream (Romberg & Saffran, 2010). Research on infants with FR of dyslexia has evidenced that family risk is strongly associated with a deficit in the perception and segmentation of speech, which supports the hypothesis that phonological deficits in dyslexia have their origins in poor sensitivity to speech stimuli (Lohvansuu, Hämäläinen, Ervast, Lyytinen, & Leppänen, 2018;Snowling, Lervåg, Nash, & Hulme, 2019). In their longitudinal study, Lohvansuu et al (2018) documented that atypical brain responses to speech sounds in infancy could implicate a deficient development of phonological representations that later hindered access to lexicon in at-risk children.…”

Bridging sensory and language theories of dyslexia: towards a multifactorial model

“…Perhaps Talcott et al (2000) best addressed this question by administering auditory, visual, and phonological tasks to 32 children, concluding that a measure of visual motion processing explained some additional variance in reading skill beyond a measure of PA. A follow-up study in more than 300 school-aged children replicated the finding that visual and auditory psychophysics explained variance in both phonological and literacy skills but did not clarify the fit of a cascading model (Talcott et al, 2002). Several others have observed evidence that psychophysical measures influence reading skill separate from the proposed phonological pathway (Snowling, Lervåg, Nash, & Hulme, 2019;Stein, 2001;White et al, 2006). Despite these findings, cascading deficit models remain at the forefront of the dyslexia debate, particularly for theories that hold a central role for sensory deficits (reviewed in (Goswami, 2015)).…”