The Speed of Articulatory Movements Involved in Speech Production in Children With Dyslexia

Abstract

A group of children with dyslexia (mean ages 9 and 14 years) was studied, together with group of children without dyslexia matched for age. Participants were monolingual native speakers of the Bosnian language with transparent orthography. In total, the diagnostic tests were performed with 41 children with dyslexia and 41 nondyslexic children. The participants were asked to produce monosyllables, /pa/, /ta/, and /ka/, and the trisyllable /pataka/, as fast as possible. Analysis was undertaken in four ways: (1) time of occlusion duration for plosives (duration of stop), (2) voice onset time for plosives, (3) diadochokinetic rate--articulators rate measured by pronunciation of monosyllables and the trisyllable, and (4) time of moving articulators from one gesture to another-time of interval length (from the explosion of one plosive to the start of the explosion of another plosive). The results suggest that children with dyslexia have significant problems with the speed of articulatory movements involved in speech production.

One-to-One or One Too Many ? Linking Sound-to-Letter Mappings to Speech Sound Perception and Production in Early Readers

“…In the speech production task, speech onset time (SOT; see Table 1) was used as a behavioral indicator of the time needed to prepare and initiate the oral response. Building on recent findings from Popescu and Noiray (2021) and in line with the literature showing that children with poor reading skills (e.g., children with dyslexia) are slower to articulate and produce syllables compared to their peers with no reading problems (Duranovic & Sehic, 2013;Fawcett & Nicolson, 2002), we set out to investigate if these reading-related effects-in addition to being present at the articulatory level-may also be seen at higher levels of speech production (i.e., the level of speech planning). We hypothesized that children with better decoding skills would also be overall faster at producing isolated speech sounds.…”

Exploring the Overlap Between Dyslexia and Speech Sound Production Deficits

“…These studies have noted that even in toddlerhood, children with familial risk of dyslexia who eventually develop dyslexia produce more consonantal errors (Lambrecht Smith et al, 2010;Scarborough, 1990) and use slower speaking rates (Smith, Roberts, Smith, Locke, & Bennett, 2006) than their peers at familial risk for dyslexia who do not develop the disorder. Additional speech production deficits have been implicated among children, adolescents, and adults with dyslexia with respect to phonetic accuracy during speech production (Bertucci, Hook, Haynes, Macaruso, & Bickley, 2003;Catts, 1986Catts, , 1989Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 2001), articulatory speed (Duranovic & Sehic, 2013;Fawcett & Nicolson, 2002), speaking rate (Catts, 1989), and speech motor planning/ programming (Peter, Lancaster, Vose, Middleton, & Stoel-Gammon, 2017). Of note, the speech errors in those with dyslexia are atypical and do not follow the pattern of systematic misarticulations or distortions characteristic of a clinically diagnosed speech sound disorder.…”

Prosody and Reading in Dyslexic Children

“…Investigations in this direction have been conducted on prosodic perception, as mentioned earlier, and also on speech production. As for the latter type of studies, the majority of them have as a focus the production of speech, with the units of analyses varying from isolated phonemes (Lalain, Joly-Pottuz, Nguyen, & Habib, 2003), isolated syllables (Duranovic & Sehic, 2013) and syllable sequences (Fawcett & Nicolson, 2002) to speaking turns in early spontaneous speech (Smith, Lambrecht Smith, Locke, & Bennett, 2008). However, there is a lack of studies on the prosody of the speech produced in the reading aloud by dyslexic children.…”