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Speech perception abilities of adults with dyslexia: is there any evidence for a true deficit?

Suzan Nouwens
Institute of Linguistics OTS, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands

Bethanie Shakespeare
Speech Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, UCL, London, UK

Corresponding Author: Prof. Valerie Hazan, UCL Department of Speech Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, UCL, Chandler House, 2, Wakefield Street, London London WC1N 1PF, Tel: + 44 20 7679 4076, Fax: + 44 (0) 207 679 4010

Purpose: This study investigated whether adults with dyslexia show evidence of a consistent speech perception deficit by testing phoneme categorization and word perception in noise.

Method: Seventeen adults with dyslexia and 20 average readers underwent a test battery including standardized reading, language and phonological awareness tests, and tests of speech perception. Categorization of a ‘pea’/‘bee’ voicing contrast was evaluated using adaptive identification and discrimination tasks, presented in quiet and in noise, and a fixed-step discrimination task. Two further tests of word perception in noise were presented.

Results: There were no significant group differences for categorization in quiet or noise, for across- and within-category discrimination as measured adaptively, or word perception, but average-readers showed better across- and within-category discrimination in the fixed-step discrimination. Individuals did not show consistent poor performance across related tasks.

Conclusions: The small number of group differences, and lack of consistent poor individual performance, suggests weak support for a speech perception deficit in dyslexia. It seems likely that at least some poor performances are attributable to non-sensory factors like attention. It may also be that some individuals with dyslexia have speech perceptual acuity that is at the lower end of the normal range and exacerbated by non-sensory factors.

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