Speech perception and frequency discrimination in good and poor readers

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Abstract
The relation between speech perception and reading ability was investigated. Identification and discrimination tests with stimuli on a stop consonant place of articulation continuum (/PA/-/IA/) were presented to various groups of good and poor readers (normal first graders on a reading continuum in Study 1, moderately and severely dyslexic and high- and low-achieving normal children in Study 2). In both studies, reading-related perception differences were especially marked in a comparison of actual and predicted (from identification test) discrimination scores, suggesting that the poor readers have special difficulty with a discrimination-specific task demand. In Study 3, reading-group differences still show up if the stimulus pairs of the discrimination test are simply to be repeated (eliminating the similarity judgment factors), and are also very pronounced on a nonspeech discrimination test (with 130 ms pure tones of slightly different frequencies). In Studies 1 and 3 identification slope and phoneme boundary differences between reader groups were found as well. Though these results do not definitely prove the auditory perception hypothesis, they support it. The conditions that should be satisfied by auditory perception tasks in future reading acquisition research are briefly discussed.

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