Abstract
It is generally agreed that some people with dyslexia exhibit apparent impairments in auditory tasks, but there is no consensus about the underlying nature or aetiology of such impairments. Convergent evidence from a wide range of tasks suggests that any physiological explanation for auditory impairments in dyslexia must be centred at the level of thalamo-cortical and/or cortical mechanisms rather than low-level mechanisms such as basic neural timing. The literature on auditory processing in dyslexia shows high variability in the magnitude of the effects across studies, reflecting phenotypic heterogeneity in the dyslexic population as well as in task design. Measurement effects, especially when adaptive procedures are shortened or when participants make high numbers of “lapses”, may also mean that thresholds are inaccurate which can further add to difficulties in interpreting auditory data. These factors combined mean that auditory thresholds probably reflect a complicated mixture of pure sensory abilities and the additional neurocognitive mechanisms that are required for the overt perception and recognition of stimulus dimensions being tested in a given task, as well as task compliance. Future studies aiming to unpick auditory impairments in dyslexia should place strong emphasis on study design, including choice of psychometric variables and auditory measures.
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Witton, C., Talcott, J.B. (2018). Auditory Processing in Developmental Dyslexia: Some Considerations and Challenges. In: Lachmann, T., Weis, T. (eds) Reading and Dyslexia. Literacy Studies, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90805-2_7
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