14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Perception of Duration in Infants with High Genetic Risk for Dyslexia

Ulla Richardson, Matti Leiwo, Paavo H. T. Leppänen, Heikki Lyytinen

University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Developmental dyslexia (specific reading and spelling difficulty) can affect people's lives profoundly. The causes of the disorder are unknown. What is known is that there is strong tendency of dyslexia to be family aggregated. As yet very little is known of the early signs of the disorder. In this study the speech perception of infants of dyslexic parents as young as 6 months of age was found to differ significantly from that of infants with normal reading parents; infants born of dyslexic parents perceived the duration of an occluson of [t] in a markedly different way from infants born of normally reading parents. Similar percpetual tendencies were also found in the parents of the infants. The study suggests that a temporal processing deficiency in categorizing speech sounds may be an early sign of risk for dyslexia in infants.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Richardson, Ulla / Leiwo, Matti / Leppänen, Paavo H. T. / Lyytinen, Heikki (1999): "Perception of duration in infants with high genetic risk for dyslexia", In ICPhS-14, 1909-1912.