Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Basic auditory processing and developmental dyslexia in Chinese

  • Published:
Reading and Writing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The present study explores the relationship between basic auditory processing of sound rise time, frequency, duration and intensity, phonological skills (onset-rime and tone awareness, sound blending, RAN, and phonological memory) and reading disability in Chinese. A series of psychometric, literacy, phonological, auditory, and character processing tasks were given to 73 native speakers of Mandarin with an average age of 9.7 years. Twenty-six children had developmental dyslexia, 29 were chronological age-matched controls (CA controls) and 18 were reading-matched controls (RL controls). Chinese children with dyslexia were significantly poorer than CA controls in almost all phonological tasks, in semantic radical search, and in phonological recoding proficiency. Chinese children with dyslexia also showed significant impairments in most of the basic auditory processing tasks. Regression analyses demonstrated that different auditory measures of rise time discrimination were the strongest predictors of individual differences in Chinese character reading (1 Rise task) and phonological recoding (2 Rise task) respectively, with frequency discrimination also important for nonsense syllable decoding. Our results support the hypothesis that accurate perception of the amplitude envelope of speech is critical for phonological development and consequently reading acquisition across languages.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. A subset of these data (comprising the tone awareness task, the Chinese character recognition measure, one RAN task, and 5 of the auditory processing measures) have been published previously as part of a comparison between developmental dyslexia in Chinese, Spanish, and English (Goswami et al. 2010b). However, that report compared the CA controls and the children with dyslexia only, whereas in the current paper we compare the CA controls with RL controls and children with dyslexia for those previously published measures, as well as reporting performance in the context of a much larger range of experimental tasks.

References

  • Bradley, L., & Bryant, P. E. (1978). Difficulties in auditory organisation as a possible cause of reading backwardness. Nature, 271, 746–747.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Casalis, S., & Loius-Alexandre, M.-F. (2000). Morphological analysis, phonological analysis and learning to read French: A longitudinal study. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12, 303–335.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, C. K. K., & Siegel, L. S. (2001). Phonological processing in reading Chinese among normally achieving and poor readers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 80, 23–43.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chen, H. (1999). The establishment of abbreviated Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children using the Taiwan standardization sample. Psychological Testing, 46, 13–32.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chen, K. J., & Liu, S. H. (1992). Word identification for Mandarin Chinese sentences. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Nantes, France. 23–28 Aug, 1992.

  • Cheung, H., Chung, K. K., Wong, S. W., McBride-Chang, C., Penney, T. B., & Ho, C. S. H. (2009). Perception of tone and aspiration contrasts in Chinese children with dyslexia. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 50, 726–733.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cheung, H., & Ng, L. K. H. (2003). Chinese reading development in some major Chinese Societies: An introduction. In C. McBride-Chang & H. C. Chen (Eds.), Reading development in Chinese children (pp. 3–17). Westport, C.T.: Praeger Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chow, B. W. Y., McBride-Chang, C., & Burgess, S. (2005). Phonological processing skills and early reading abilities in Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners learning to read English as a second language. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 81–87.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chung, K. K. H., McBride-Chang, C., Wong, S. W. L., Cheung, H., Penney, T. B., & Ho, C. S. H. (2008). The role of visual and auditory temporal processing for Chinese children with developmental dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 58, 15–35.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Denckla, M. B., & Rudel, R. (1974). Rapid automatized naming of pictured objects, colors, letters and numbers by normal children. Cortex, 10, 186–202.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ding, Y., Richman, L. C., Yang, L., & Guo, J. (2010). Rapid automatized naming and immediate memory functions in Chinese Mandarin-speaking elementary readers. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43, 48–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Flores-d’Arcais, G. B. (1992). Graphemic, phonological and semantic activation processes during the recognition of Chinese characters. In H. C. Chen & O. J. L. Tzeng (Eds.), Language processing in Chinese (pp. 37–66). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Fox, B., & Routh, D. K. (1975). Analysing spoken language into words, syllables, and phonemes: A developmental study. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 4, 331–342.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, J. W. (1986). The perceptual attack time of musical tones. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 82, 88–105.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goswami, U., Gerson, D., & Astruc, L. (2010a). Amplitude envelope perception, phonology and prosodic sensitivity in children with developmental dyslexia. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23, 995–1019.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goswami, U., Thomson, J., Richardson, U., Stainthorp, R., Hughes, D., Rosen, S., et al. (2002). Amplitude envelope onsets and developmental dyslexia: a new hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 10911–10916.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goswami, U., Wang, H. S. L., Cruz, A., Fosker, T., Fegan, N., & Huss, M. (2010b). Language-universal sensory deficits in developmental dyslexia: English, Spanish and Chinese. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, published online March 2010. doi:10.1162/jocn.2010.21453.

  • Greenberg, S. (1999). Speaking in shorthand—A syllable-centric perspective for understanding pronunciation variation. Speech Communication, 29, 159–176.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greenberg, S., Carvey, H., Hitchcock, L., & Chang, S. (2003). Temporal properties of spontaneous speech—A syllable-centric perspective. Journal of Phonetics, 31, 465–485.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hämäläinen, J., Leppänen, P. H. T., Eklund, K., Thomson, J., Richardson, U., Guttorm, T. K., et al. (2009). Common variance in amplitude envelope perception tasks and their impact on phoneme duration perception and reading and spelling in Finnish children with reading disabilities. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 511–530.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hämäläinen, J., Leppänen, P. H. T., Torppa, M., Müller, K., & Lyytinen, H. (2005). Detection of sound rise time by adults with dyslexia. Brain and Language, 94, 32–42.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hämäläinen, J. A., Salminen, H. K., & Leppänen, P. H. T. (in press). Basic auditory processing deficits in dyslexia – Review of the behavioral and event-related potential/field evidence. Journal of Learning Disabilities.

  • Ho, C. S. H., & Bryant, P. (1997). Development of phonological awareness of Chinese children in Hong Kong. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26, 109–126.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ho, C. S. H., & Bryant, P. (1999). Different visual skills are important in learning to read English and Chinese. Educational and Child Psychology, 16, 4–14.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ho, C. S. H., Chan, D. W., Tsang, S., & Lee, S. (2002). The cognitive profile and multiple-deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Developmental Psychology, 38, 543–553.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ho, C. S. H., Chan, D., Tsang, S. M., Lee, S. H., & Luan, V. H. (2004). Cognitive profiling and preliminary subtyping in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Cognition, 91, 43–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ho, C. S. H., & Lai, D. N. (1999). Naming-speed deficits and phonological memory deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Learning and Individual Differences, 11, 173–186.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ho, C. S. H., Law, T. P., & Ng, P. M. (2000). The phonological deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 13, 57–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ho, C. S. H., & Ma, R. N. (1999). Training in phonological strategies improves Chinese dyslexic children’s character reading skills. Journal of Research in Reading, 22, 131–142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hoequist, C. E. (1983). The perceptual center and rhythm categories. Language and Speech, 26, 367–376.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hu, C. F. (2004). The development of phonological representations among Chinese-speaking children. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics, 2, 103–130.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hu, C., & Catts, H. W. (1998). The role of phonological processing in early reading ability: What we can learn from Chinese. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2, 55–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huang, H. S., & Hanley, J. R. (1994). Phonological awareness and visual skills in learning to read Chinese and English. Cognition, 54, 73–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huang, H. S., & Hanley, J. R. (1997). A longitudinal study of phonological awareness, visual skills, and Chinese reading acquisition among first-graders in Taiwan. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 20, 249–268.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Joris, P. X., Schreiner, C. E., & Rees, A. (2004). Neural processing of amplitude modulated sounds. Physiological Reviews, 84, 541–577.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, J., & Davis, C. (2004). Characteristics of poor readers of Korean Hangul: Auditory, visual and phonological processing. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 153–185.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liao, C. H., Georgiou, G. K., & Parrila, R. (2008). Rapid naming speed and Chinese character recognition. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21, 231–253.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lorenzi, C., Dumont, A., & Füllgrabe, C. (2000). Use of temporal cues by children with developmental dyslexia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 43, 1367–1379.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lu, L., & Liu, H. S. (1994). Manual for Peabody picture vocabulary test-revised (Chinese). Taipei, Taiwan: Psychological Publishing Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Luo, X., & Fu, Q. J. (2004). Enhancing Chinese tone recognition by manipulating amplitude envelope: Implications for cochlear implants. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116, 3659–3667.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lyytinen, H., Guttorm, T. K., Huttunen, T., Hämäläinen, J., Leppänen, P. H. T., & Vesterinen, M. (2005). Psychophysiology of developmental dyslexia: A review of findings including studies of children at risk for dyslexia. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 18, 167–195.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Makita, K. (1968). The rarity of reading disability in Japanese children. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 38, 599–614.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McBride-Chang, C., Bialystok, E., Chong, K. K. Y., & Li, Y. (2004). Levels of phonological awareness in three cultures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 89, 93–111.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McBride-Chang, C., & Chen, H. C. (Eds.). (2003). Reading development in Chinese children. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishing.

  • McBride-Chang, C., & Ho, C. S. H. (2000). Developmental issues in Chinese children’s character acquisition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 50–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McBride-Chang, C., & Ho, C. S. H. (2005). Predictors of beginning reading in Chinese and English: A 2-Year longitudinal study of Chinese kindergartners. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9, 117–144.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McBride-Chang, C., Lam, F., Lam, C., Doo, S., Wong, S. W. L., & Chow, Y. Y. Y. (2008). Word recognition and cognitive profiles of Chinese pre-school children at risk for dyslexia through language delay or familial history of dyslexia. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 49, 211–218.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meng, X., Sai, X., Wang, C., Wang, J., Sha, S., & Zhou, X. (2005). Auditory and speech processing and reading development in Chinese school children: Behavioural and ERP evidence. Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 11, 292–310.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morton, J., Marcus, S., & Frankish, C. (1976). Perceptual centers (P-centers). Psychological Review, 83, 405–408.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Muneaux, M., Ziegler, J. C., Truc, C., Thomson, J., & Goswami, U. (2004). Deficits in beat perception and dyslexia: Evidence from French. Neuroreport, 15, 1255–1259.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ramus, F., White, S., & Frith, U. (2006). Weighing the evidence between competing theories of dyslexia. Developmental Science, 9, 265–269.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reed, M. A. (1989). Speech perception and the discrimination of brief auditory cues in reading disabled children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 48, 270–292.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Richardson, U., Thomson, J. M., Scott, S. K., & Goswami, U. (2004). Auditory processing skills and phonological representation in dyslexic children. Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 10, 215–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rocheron, I., Lorenzi, C., Füllgrabe, C., & Dumont, A. (2002). Temporal envelope perception in dyslexic children. Neuroreport, 13, 1683–1687.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, S. K. (1998). The point of P-centres. Psychological Research/Psychologische Forschung, 61, 4–11.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Seki, A., Kassai, K., Uchiyama, H., & Koeda, T. (2008). Reading ability and phonological awareness in Japanese children with dyslexia. Brain and Development, 30, 179–188.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shu, H., McBride-Chang, C., Wu, S., & Liu, H. (2006). Understanding Chinese developmental dyslexia: Morphological awareness as a core cognitive construct. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 122–133.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shu, H., Meng, X., Chen, X., Luan, H., & Cao, F. (2005). The subtypes of developmental dyslexia in Chinese: Evidence from three cases. Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 11, 311–329.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shu, H., Peng, H., & McBride-Chang, C. (2008). Phonological awareness in young Chinese children. Developmental Science, 11, 171–181.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Siok, W. T., & Fletcher, P. (2001). The role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition. Developmental Psychology, 37, 886–899.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Siok, W. T., Niu, Z., Jin, Z., Perfetti, C. A., & Tan, L. H. (2008). A structural-functional basis for dyslexia in the cortex of Chinese readers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 5561–5566.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Siok, W. T., Perfetti, C. A., Jin, Z., & Tan, L. H. (2004). Biological abnormality of impaired reading is constrained by culture. Nature, 431, 71–76.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Snowling, M. J. (2000). Dyslexia (2nd ed.). Malden, M.A.: Blackwell Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • So, D., & Siegel, L. S. (1997). Learning to read Chinese: Semantic, syntactic, phonological and working memory skills in normally achieving and poor Chinese readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9, 1–21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stevenson, H. W., Stigler, J. W., Lucker, G. W., Lee, S. Y., Hsu, C. C., & Kitamura, S. (1982). Reading disabilities: The case of Chinese, Japanese, and English. Child Development, 53, 1164–1181.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Surányi, Z., Csépe, V., Richardson, U., Thomson, J. M., Honbolygó, F., & Goswami, U. (2009). Sensitivity to rhythmic parameters in dyslexic children: A comparison of Hungarian and English. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 22, 41–56.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Swan, D., & Goswami, U. (1997). Picture naming deficits in developmental dyslexia: The phonological representations hypothesis. Brain and Language, 56, 334–353.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Taft, M., Liu, Y., & Zhu, X. (1999). Morphemic processing in reading Chinese. In J. Wang, A. W. Inhoff, & H. C. Chen (Eds.), Reading Chinese script: A cognitive analysis (pp. 91–113). Mahweh, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tallal, P. (1980). Auditory temporal perception, phonics, and reading disabilities in children. Brain and Language, 9, 182–198.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tseng, C. Y., & Lee, Y. L. (2004). Intensity in relation to prosody organization. Paper presented at the 4th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing. Hong Kong, China. 15–18 Dec, 2004.

  • Tzeng, S. (1997). Working memory and phonological processing in Taiwanese students with low language achievement (Technical report of Taiwan National Science Council No. 84-2421-H-143-001 -F5). Taipei, Taiwan: Taiwan National Science Council.

  • Vos, J., & Rasch, R. A. (1981). The perceptual onset of musical tones. Perception and Psychophysics, 29, 323–335.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wagner, R. K., & Torgesen, J. K. (1987). The nature of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills. Psychological Bulletin, 101, 192–212.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Witton, C., Stein, J. F., Stoodley, C. J., Rosner, B. S., & Talcott, J. B. (2002). Separate influences of acoustic AM and FM sensitivity on the phonological decoding skills of impaired and normal readers. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 866–874.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yopp, H. K. (1988). The validity and reliability of phonemic awareness tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 159–177.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 3–29.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participating schools, teachers, and children in Taiwan; and also Mrs. Hong-In Chen and Dr. Chia-Ying Lee for their kindly support. This research was supported by funding from the Medical Research Council, grant G0400574, and from a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to Usha Goswami; J.H. was supported by the Academy of Finland, H.L.S.W. by Cambridge ORS and COT Scholarships. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Usha Goswami, Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Downing St., Cambridge CB2 3EB, U.K.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge, Downing St., Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK

    Hsiao-Lan Sharon Wang, Martina Huss, Jarmo A. Hämäläinen & Usha Goswami

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Jarmo A. Hämäläinen

Authors
  1. Hsiao-Lan Sharon Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Martina Huss
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Jarmo A. Hämäläinen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Usha Goswami
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Usha Goswami.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Wang, HL.S., Huss, M., Hämäläinen, J.A. et al. Basic auditory processing and developmental dyslexia in Chinese. Read Writ 25, 509–536 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-010-9284-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-010-9284-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation