Investigating speech perception in children with dyslexia: is there evidence of a consistent deficit in individuals?

PURPOSE The claim that speech perception abilities are impaired in dyslexia was investigated in a group of 62 children with dyslexia and 51 average readers matched in age. METHOD To test whether there was robust evidence of speech perception deficits in children with dyslexia, speech perception in noise and quiet was measured using 8 different tasks involving the identification and discrimination of a complex and highly natural synthetic "bee"-"pea" contrast (copy synthesized from natural models) and the perception of naturally produced words. RESULTS Children with dyslexia, on average, performed more poorly than did average readers in the synthetic syllables identification task in quiet and in across-category discrimination (but not when tested using an adaptive procedure). They did not differ from average readers on 2 tasks of word recognition in noise or identification of synthetic syllables in noise. For all tasks, a majority of individual children with dyslexia performed within norms. Finally, speech perception generally did not correlate with pseudoword reading or phonological processing--the core skills related to dyslexia. CONCLUSIONS On the tasks and speech stimuli that the authors used, most children with dyslexia did not appear to show a consistent deficit in speech perception.