Speech perceptual abilities of children with specific reading difficulty (dyslexia)

A group of 13 children with specific reading difficulty (SRD), together with 12 chronological-age and 12 reading-age controls were tested on a battery of speech-perceptual, psychoacoustic and reading tests. As a group, the SRD children performed worse than the controls on all reading tasks, on the speech identification tasks, on discrimination tasks involving consonant cluster contrasts, and in their discrimination of stop consonants in nonsense VCVs (vowel-consonant-vowel sets). However, only a sub-group (30%) of SRD children showed high error rates in the speech discrimination tasks, whilst the rest of the SRD group performed within norms. For this sub-group, discrimination performance was particularly poor for consonant contrasts differing in a single feature which was not acoustically salient, and errors were not limited to stop contrasts. Poor performance was also obtained in the identification tests, especially when the number of acoustic cues marking the contrast was reduced. Their performance did not differ from the controls for the psychoacoustic tasks but they showed higher error rates in their reading of nonwords. It is concluded that only a proportion of SRD children show a speech perceptual weakness, which seems to be related to a poor ability to discriminate phonemes which are acoustically similar.