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Developmental dyslexia: exploring how much phonological and visual attention span disorders are linked to simultaneous auditory processing deficits

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Abstract

The simultaneous auditory processing skills of 17 dyslexic children and 17 skilled readers were measured using a dichotic listening task. Results showed that the dyslexic children exhibited difficulties reporting syllabic material when presented simultaneously. As a measure of simultaneous visual processing, visual attention span skills were assessed in the dyslexic children. We presented the dyslexic children with a phonological short-term memory task and a phonemic awareness task to quantify their phonological skills. Visual attention spans correlated positively with individual scores obtained on the dichotic listening task while phonological skills did not correlate with either dichotic scores or visual attention span measures. Moreover, all the dyslexic children with a dichotic listening deficit showed a simultaneous visual processing deficit, and a substantial number of dyslexic children exhibited phonological processing deficits whether or not they exhibited low dichotic listening scores. These findings suggest that processing simultaneous auditory stimuli may be impaired in dyslexic children regardless of phonological processing difficulties and be linked to similar problems in the visual modality.

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Notes

  1. The purpose of the present study was not to assess hemispheric specialization for linguistic processing (e.g., the right ear advantage), a question, however, frequently investigated using dichotic listening paradigms. Here, we only focused on the processing of several auditory stimuli presented simultaneously, hence we did not analyze performance on focused conditions (i.e., when instruction on the report on one specific ear is given before the dichotic presentation of stimuli).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the French Research Ministry, the Fyssen foundation, and the European commission (FP7 program, people). We thank Marie-Ange N’Guyen, Emilie Longeras, Dr. Catherine Billard, and Camille Chabernaud for their valuable help in the recruitment and diagnosis of the dyslexic children and Luke Armstrong for his help on the revision of the manuscript. Lastly, we thank all the children and their family for their participation in this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 2nd Floor, 20009, Donostia, Spain

    Marie Lallier

  2. Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition (UMR CNRS 5105), Grenoble, France

    Sophie Donnadieu & Sylviane Valdois

  3. Université de Savoie, Chambéry, France

    Sophie Donnadieu

  4. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France

    Sylviane Valdois

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  1. Marie Lallier
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Correspondence to Marie Lallier.

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Lallier, M., Donnadieu, S. & Valdois, S. Developmental dyslexia: exploring how much phonological and visual attention span disorders are linked to simultaneous auditory processing deficits. Ann. of Dyslexia 63, 97–116 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-012-0074-4

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