Speech perception in severely disabled and average reading children.

Abstract

It has been hypothesized that children with specific disabilities in reading may have subtle auditory and/or speech perception deficits. To address this question, recent investigations have focussed on whether reading disabled children show categorical speech perception. These efforts have yielded equivocal results. The present study was designed to attempt to help resolve this controversy by comparing the performance of severely disabled readers with normal readers in four speech perception tasks. Results indicated that perception was significantly less categorical among the severely disabled readers in three of the four speech perception tasks. The possible implications of this small, but significant, difference are discussed.