Perception of Consonants and Lexical Tones in School-Aged Children with Reading Disabilities
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Li, Lu-Yang
Abstract
The main goal of this study was to explore the consonant and lexical tone perception in children with reading disabilities (RD). This study also investigated whether speech perception deficits in children with RD was the results of general auditory processing deficit. In addition, this study examined the perceptual organization of lexical tones in these children. Experiment 1 recruited adults and aimed to select proper speech stimuli for testing children in experiment 2. Results of experiment 1 showed that adults correctly identified consonants in a silent background condition. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis demonstrated that adults perceptual equally weighed the pitch height and the pitch direction in the perceptual organization for lexical tones. Experiment 2 aimed to examine the speech perception in 8-9 year-old children with RD. Both children with RD (n = 20) and chronological age and non-verbal IQ matched children (n = 20) participated in this experiment. Children with RD performed less accurately in identifying consonants than the matched-group children in both with/without the amplitude modulation noise in the background. In addition, children with RD demonstrated the “release from masking” effect, suggesting that the auditory processing ability of children with RD was near to normal. Results also demonstrated that children with RD performed poorer than the matched group in discriminating lexical tone contrasts. The MDS analysis revealed that perceptual organization for lexical tones of children with RD was different from that of matched group. In addition, results of both correlation and regression analyses demonstrated the strong association between speech perception performance and reading abilities. Results of this study showed the speech perception deficit in children with RD and this deficit not be the result of a general auditory processing impairment.
Subjects
speech perception
children with reading disabilities
consonant
lecixal tone
perceptual organization
release from masking
Type
thesis
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