Souhila Messaoud-Galusi

Discrimination of speech sounds by children with dyslexia: Comparisons with chronological age and reading level controls

Previous studies have shown that children suffering from developmental dyslexia have a deficit in categorical perception of speech sounds. The aim of the current study was to better understand the nature of this categorical perception deficit. In this study, categorical perception skills of children with dyslexia were compared with those of chronological age and reading level controls. Children identified and discriminated /do-to/ syllables along a voice onset time (VOT) continuum. Results showed that children with dyslexia discriminated among phonemically contrastive pairs less accurately than did chronological age and reading level controls and also showed higher sensitivity in the discrimination of allophonic contrasts. These results suggest that children with dyslexia perceive speech with allophonic units rather than phonemic units. The origin of allophonic perception in the course of perceptual development and its implication for reading acquisition are discussed.

The contribution of morphology to the consistency of spelling-to-sound relations: A quantitative analysis based on French elementary school readers

Resume Dans les systemes alphabetiques, la consistance des relations grapheme-phoneme et phoneme-grapheme est un facteur cle dans la progression de l’apprentissage de la lecture et de l’ecriture. Les difficultes rencontrees par l’apprenti lecteur dans les differentes orthographes sont donc classiquement evaluees par des etudes quantitatives des relations graphophonologiques des mots ecrits adresses a l’enfant. Toutefois, jusqu’a present, ces estimations sont realisees independamment de l’analyse morphologique. La presente etude a pour objectif d’examiner l’apport de l’information morphologique, essentiellement flexionnelle, sur les consistances des correspondances grapheme-phoneme et phoneme-grapheme d’un ensemble de pres de 10000 mots francais rencontres dans les livres scolaires a l’ecole elementaire (Lete et al., 2004). La base de donnees elaboree au cours de cette etude, Manulex_morpho, est rendue accessible sur internet.

Introduction to this Special Issue Exploring the Overlap Between Dyslexia and SLI: The Role of Phonology

Specific reading disability, or dyslexia, co-occurs with other developmental disorders at higher rates than would be predicted by chance. Significant comorbidity has been reported between dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI; McArthur, Hogben, Edwards, Heath, & Mengler, 2000), speech sound disorder (Pennington, 2006), attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (Willcutt & Pennington, 2000), central auditory processing disorder (King, Lombardino, Crandell, & Leonard, 2003), dyscalculia (Badian, 1999), and developmental coordination disorder (Visser, 2003), among others. Investigating comorbidity is important both clinically and theoretically, because it challenges us to think about how these disorders are best categorised, and probes our understanding of their underlying causes (Pennington, 2006). This special issue of Scientific Studies of Reading is devoted to investigating the comorbidity between dyslexia and SLI. Although dyslexia is characterized by severe difficulties with written language, SLI is a severe impairment in oral language development (Leonard, 1998). Both are diagnosed by exclusion: Children with dyslexia or SLI do not have impaired nonverbal intelligence, sensory impairSCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF READING, 14(1), 1–7 Copyright

The impact of talker and prosodic variability on speech perception in noise for children with dyslexia.

This study investigated whether children with dyslexia (DYS) are more affected by talker and prosodic variability when perceiving speech in noise than age‐matched average readers (ARs). 34 DYS and 25 AR children carried out syllable‐initial consonant perception tests, with natural consonant‐vowel (CV) tokens in multi‐talker babble noise (0 dB signal‐to‐noise ratio). Twelve‐alternative identification tests were presented in four conditions varying in degree of talker and intonation variability. The discrimination of place (/bi‐di/) and voicing (/bi‐pi/) contrasts was investigated with the same test conditions. When identifying CV syllables in noise, the DYS group made more errors than the AR group, but only for conditions with variable intonation. This group difference was primarily due to poorer perception by DYS children of fricative voicing and greater /m/‐/n/ confusions, i.e., contrasts with less salient acoustic differences. DYS children showed lower discrimination scores than AR children for both the...