Abstract
This study had three goals: to examine the stability of deficits in the phonological and lexical routes in dyslexia (group study), to determine the prevalence of dyslexia profiles (multiple-case study), and to identify the prediction of phonemic segmentation and discrimination skills before reading acquisition on future reading level. Among a group of 373 non-readers seen at age 5, 38 students were subsequently diagnosed as either consistent dyslexic readers (18 DYS) or consistent typical readers (20 TR). Their phonological and lexical reading skills were assessed at ages 10 and 17 and their phonemic segmentation and discrimination skills at age 5. In comparison with TR of the same chronological age (CA-TR), individuals with dyslexia demonstrated an impairment of the two reading routes, especially of the phonological reading route. In the comparison with younger TR (age 10) of the same reading level (RL-TR), only a deficit of the phonological route is observed. In the multiple-case study, the comparisons with CA-TR showed a prevalence of mixed profiles and very few dissociated profiles, whereas the comparison with RL-TR resulted mostly in two profiles depending on the measure: a phonological profile when accuracy was used and a delayed profile when speed was used. In addition, the correlations between early phonemic segmentation and discrimination skills (age 5) and later reading skills (age 17) were significant, and in the group of individuals with dyslexia, early phonemic segmentation skills significantly predicted these later reading skills. Phonological reading deficits are persistent and mainly caused by early phonemic impairments.
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22 January 2023
Figure 1 and Appendix figures are updated in the respective places in the article
Notes
These children were also seen at age of 8. We do not report the results of this testing session in the present article, and we recommend reading the original publication (Sprenger-Charolles et al., 2000).
These students were not referred to a specific educational program, since the first official texts on dyslexia in France were published in 2000 (Sprenger-Charolles, 2019), 4 years after the data collected at age 8.
Twenty children from the students seen at age 10 (Sprenger-Charolles et al., 2010), 12 individuals with dyslexia and 8 typical readers, were not in the last assessment. This is due to four reasons: lack of contact information (12), moving out of mainland France (3) or very far from Paris (2), and refusal to participate (3). At age 5, differences in age, pre-reading skills, and non-verbal and verbal IQ between these 20 children and those who could be followed up to age 17 were not significant.
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This study was supported by a first grant from the French Ministry of Health (17–02-001) and by a second grant from the French National Research Agency (ANR-18-CE28-0006 DYSuccess).
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Appendix. Clarification on the semi-automatic system used to calculate the duration of vocal responses
Appendix. Clarification on the semi-automatic system used to calculate the duration of vocal responses
Voice keys, usually proposed to detect the onset of a vocal response, are triggered from a single amplitude threshold, so that various spurious noises can interfere with the measurement. To circumvent this problem, we used a program to visualize and listen to the speech signal (see Fig. 2)
Example of the visualization of a speech signal, here the word “dance”. The red line corresponds to the real beginning of the word
, in addition to a semi-automatic detection program (see Figs.
The speech signal of the word dance after the first smoothing procedure with the 10 ms time constant. The red line corresponds to the real beginning of the word
3 and
The speech signal of the word dance after the second smoothing procedure with the 50 ms constant in addition to the first smoothing procedure. The red line corresponds to the real beginning of the word
4), developed under the direction of René Carré (CNRS and France-telecom, now honorary senior researcher).
Figure 2 gives the example of the speech signal corresponding to the word “dance”: the real beginning of that word (considering the pre-voicing of the plosive /d/), is located at 635 ms (cf. the red vertical dotted line), two spurious noises are found before this mark.
The semi-automatic detection program exploits the energy characteristics of the recorded signal which, after calculation, is smoothed with a first time constant of 10 ms. A new smoothing is then carried out, with a time constant of 50 ms, which makes it possible to eliminate short-lived interference and to obtain (by thresholding) an evaluation of the position of the beginning of the signal. From this value, the signal is scanned backwards to detect its beginning with a better accuracy.
Figure 3, which represents the energy (dB) after the two successive smoothing procedures, shows that the spurious noise has almost disappeared. Figure 3 represents the energy (dB) smoothed with the first time constant of 10 ms. On this curve, looking upstream from the previous dotted line, we find the beginning of the energy rise and obtain a starting point at 635 ms, which corresponds to the beginning of the speech signal represented in Fig. 2. The 2 peaks preceding this mark (spurious noise) are not considered.
After running the program, we found that, if the useful signal is framed by a sufficiently large time window, the detection of the beginning of the signal is very reliable (less than 1/100th of the real time, after verification by listening). However, some interfering noises (coughing, hesitations…) cannot be easily eliminated by the developed procedure, so it is always necessary to visualize and listen to the original vocal signal (Fig. 2).
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Lefèvre, E., Cavalli, E., Colé, P. et al. Tracking reading skills and reading-related skills in dyslexia before (age 5) and after (ages 10–17) diagnosis. Ann. of Dyslexia 73, 260–287 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-022-00277-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-022-00277-x