Does rapid auditory perception underlie the phonological awareness difficulties found in children with dyslexia?
Previous research has found that groups of individuals with dyslexia (impaired reading) perform worse than controls on tasks requiring rapid visual and auditory perception. The magnocellular deficit is one theory that has been proposed to explain such findings in the auditory and visual domain. This suggests that people with dyslexia may have a general deficit in “magnocellular” cells that are responsible for perception of transient and rapid stimuli in a variety of senses. However, there have been inconsistent results and large variations in scores found within groups with dyslexia on similar tasks. Children’s wavering and inconsistent attention has been one variable found to confound previous studies in perception. In particular, it has been proposed that students that have difficulty with sustained and/or shifting attention have shown inferior performance on tasks of auditory perception and in reading. To explore whether a “magnocellular deficit” may underlie poor phonemic awareness
