The Dyslexic Brain Struggles in Processing Variation in Speech

A new study brings neural-level evidence that the continuous variation in natural speech makes the discrimination of phonemes challenging for adults suffering from developmental reading-deficit dyslexia. This may compromise the learning of native language phonemes already at an early age for infants at familial risk for dyslexia. Dyslexia is understood to stem from difficulties in phoneme processing. Natural speech has continuous acoustic variation, and the phonemes sound different depending on, for example, the word context or speaker identity. In order to effortlessly understand speech, the phonemes still have to be detected accurately. “In our study, dyslexic participants had difficulties, particularly when acoustic variation was added to the speech sound stream. In the absence of this variation, neural speech sound processing did not differ between dyslexic and typical readers. This seems to reflect a difficulty in categorising speech sounds in the native language phoneme classes,” Dr Paula Virtala from the University of Helsinki explains. https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/the-dyslexic-brain-struggles-in-processing-variation-in-speech-336663?utm_campaign=NEWSLETTER_TN_Breaking%20Science%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=90288506&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_4JwWyIxrpMgL3NE3LxWMdNzEcKwCXeWVVPU-__NuUZnkiTrK6X0tzu6iT5egUtRVHBmwbD1cXhRVAAdNk7SjY-rrkbA&utm_content=90288506&utm_source=hs_email