15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Relation Between Categorical Perception of Speech and Reading Acquisition

Caroline Bogliotti

LEAPLE-CNRS, France

Data before and after reading acquisition were collected in order to study the influence of linguistic experience and literacy on the emergence and consistency of categorical perception (CP). Children aged 6 and 7 years identified and discriminated [do] and [to] syllables from a VOT continuum. The same paradigm was proposed to 10 years old children. The latter were subdivided according to their reading performance to assess whether categorical perception is impaired in poor readers. From 6 to 7 categorical perception improved. As subjects differed both in age and reading experience, these data bring out the question of the relation between linguistic maturation and literacy. Poor readers were less accurate in the discrimination of phonemically contrastive pairs. On the contrary they performed better than controls for the discrimination of phonemically irrelevant contrasts. The origin of the categorical deficit displayed by poor readers, and its possible influence on reading performance is discussed.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bogliotti, Caroline (2003): "Relation between categorical perception of speech and reading acquisition", In ICPhS-15, 885-888.