Is there a relationship between speech and nonspeech auditory processing in children with dyslexia?
A group of 8 young teenagers with dyslexia were compared to age-matched control participants on a number of speech and nonspeech auditory tasks. There were no differences between the control participants and the teenagers with dyslexia in forward and simultaneous masking, nor were there any differences in frequency selectivity as indexed by performance with a bandstop noise. Thresholds for backward masking in a broadband noise were elevated for the teenagers with dyslexia as a group. If this deficit in backward masking had an influence on speech perception, we might expect the perception of “ba” versus “da” to be affected, as the crucial second formant transition is followed by a vowel. On the other hand, as forward masking is not different in the two groups, we would expect the perception of “ab” versus “ad” to be unaffected, as the contrastive second formant transition is preceded by a vowel. Overall speech identification and discrimination performance for these two contrasts was sup
