Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

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Our work has suggested that there were significant links between Chinese children’s perception of speech prosody and their reading abilities. In this talk, we will review the publications. From the behavioral data, our study found that poor auditory frequency processing may associate with Chinese developmental dyslexia with phonological deficits. In support of the phonological deficit hypothesis, what underlies phonological deficit is likely to be auditory-basis. Particularly, Chinese-speaking children with reading difficulties were significantly related to frequency-modulated sweep identification. Lexical tone awareness was significantly associated with basic auditory frequency processing tasks. The magnetoencephalographic data revealed that significant between-group difference was caused by differences in the level of auditory sensory processing, reflected by the P1m component elicited by sound frequency sweep stimuli. This biological finding indicated that auditory sensory processing was affected by both the duration and the direction of a frequency sweep. Sensitivity to changes in sound duration and frequency may be crucial for the processing of suprasegmental features in speech. Therefore, this sensory deficit might be associated with difficulties discriminating frequency contour in Chinese. Finally, we suggest to provide an assistive listening technology to help these children with learning difficulties.