The role of anchoring in auditory and speech perception in the general and in dyslexic populations

Theoretical treatments of language, reading and their disorders are typically modular. They postulate that because individuals with (for instance) dyslexia are more impaired in their reading than in any other cognitive domain, the core deficit(s) should be traced back to a specific cognitive process that is critical for reading, but not for other functions (see Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon, 2004 for an example). Similarly, because children diagnosed with language deficits are often those who have more pronounced difficulties in specific aspects of language (e.g., syntax, phonology), explanations are sought in a particular linguistic domain. This view however fails to account for findings that pure cases are rare and that individuals who fail to develop adequate reading also have deficits in other cognitive and perceptual domains. Thus, understanding domain specific deficits as part of a more general cognitive difficulty may provide a better characterization of the underlying mechanisms. Following this conceptualization, we propose that the difficulties experienced by individuals with dyslexia (often concurrent with broader language difficulties) across cognitive domains such as reading, working memory and perception can be explained as a result of a core, domain general difficulty in anchoring, namely impaired ability to implicitly detect the statistical regularities of environmental sounds.