Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Rise time and formant transition duration in the discrimination of speech sounds: the Ba–Wa distinction in developmental dyslexia

Rise time and formant transition duration in the discrimination of speech sounds: the Ba–Wa... Across languages, children with developmental dyslexia have a specific difficulty with the neural representation of the sound structure (phonological structure) of speech. One likely cause of their difficulties with phonology is a perceptual difficulty in auditory temporal processing (Tallal, 1980). Tallal (1980) proposed that basic auditory processing of brief, rapidly successive acoustic changes is compromised in dyslexia, thereby affecting phonetic discrimination (e.g. discriminating /b/ from /d/) via impaired discrimination of formant transitions (rapid acoustic changes in frequency and intensity). However, an alternative auditory temporal hypothesis is that the basic auditory processing of the slower amplitude modulation cues in speech is compromised (Goswami , 2002). Here, we contrast children’s perception of a synthetic speech contrast (ba/wa) when it is based on the speed of the rate of change of frequency information (formant transition duration) versus the speed of the rate of change of amplitude modulation (rise time). We show that children with dyslexia have excellent phonetic discrimination based on formant transition duration, but poor phonetic discrimination based on envelope cues. The results explain why phonetic discrimination may be allophonic in developmental dyslexia (Serniclaes , 2004), and suggest new avenues for the remediation of developmental dyslexia. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Developmental Science Wiley

Rise time and formant transition duration in the discrimination of speech sounds: the Ba–Wa distinction in developmental dyslexia

Download PDF
10 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/wiley/rise-time-and-formant-transition-duration-in-the-discrimination-of-A5nuvrmtsR

References (49)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
ISSN
1363-755X
eISSN
1467-7687
DOI
10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00955.x
pmid
21159086
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Across languages, children with developmental dyslexia have a specific difficulty with the neural representation of the sound structure (phonological structure) of speech. One likely cause of their difficulties with phonology is a perceptual difficulty in auditory temporal processing (Tallal, 1980). Tallal (1980) proposed that basic auditory processing of brief, rapidly successive acoustic changes is compromised in dyslexia, thereby affecting phonetic discrimination (e.g. discriminating /b/ from /d/) via impaired discrimination of formant transitions (rapid acoustic changes in frequency and intensity). However, an alternative auditory temporal hypothesis is that the basic auditory processing of the slower amplitude modulation cues in speech is compromised (Goswami , 2002). Here, we contrast children’s perception of a synthetic speech contrast (ba/wa) when it is based on the speed of the rate of change of frequency information (formant transition duration) versus the speed of the rate of change of amplitude modulation (rise time). We show that children with dyslexia have excellent phonetic discrimination based on formant transition duration, but poor phonetic discrimination based on envelope cues. The results explain why phonetic discrimination may be allophonic in developmental dyslexia (Serniclaes , 2004), and suggest new avenues for the remediation of developmental dyslexia.

Journal

Developmental Science – Wiley

Published: Jan 1, 2011

There are no references for this article.