Phoneme Resistance and Phoneme Confusion in Noise: Impact of Dyslexia

Description

Understanding speech in noisy environments is a challenge for almost everyone and particularly so for people with dyslexia. To better understand the phonological processing deficit, which has been posited as a core trait of dyslexia, we wanted to further characterize the impact of noise on speech perception. In this paper, we investigated phoneme resistance to noise for dyslexic and control adults and explored the pattern of errors produced by noise interference. Our aim was to examine differences between phoneme confusion matrices of the two populations. Disyllabic nouns were embedded in noise and participants had to perform an auditory word identification task. Error rates, phoneme resistance and phoneme confusions were compared between a dyslexic and a group of matched controls. Error rate was higher in the dyslexic group. However, no qualitative differences in the profile of errors were found. The coronals /ʃ and s/ were the most resistant phoneme in both groups while the labials /f, m and v/ were the most vulnerable. Although dyslexics showed a more scattered pattern of confusions, the matrices were correlated. Our results confirm a phonological deficit in dyslexia whereas they do not support the hypothesis of qualitative differences in phonological representation between the two groups.

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