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

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


The Effect of Age and Reading Level on Perceptual Weighting Strategy

Souhila Messaoud-Galusi

LEAPLE-CNRS, France

Transition and vocalic roundness is known to affect perception of the preceding fricative. The relevance of these factors were found to differ in adults and children, by Nittrouer et al (1997). We replicated part of this paradigm, and noticed that

  1. French adults and 1st graders differed, but not in the use of the same cues as English speakers in Nittrouer et al's paper. We observed a developmental increase of the transition effect, and a developmental decrease in the effect of the vowel identity on the identification of the preceding fricative.
  2. We reproduced the dyslexics' well known categorical deficit, and observed that they weighted more the vowel than the transition to identify the preceding fricative, as did younger reading controls.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Messaoud-Galusi, Souhila (2003): "The effect of age and reading level on perceptual weighting strategy", In ICPhS-15, 1971-1974.