Do Dynamic Visual Analogues Aid Detection of Auditory Stress Patterns in Dyslexia?
Victoria Cheah, Jarmo Hamalainen, Fruzsina Soltesz, Usha Goswami
Poster
Time: 2009-06-29 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Last modified: 2009-06-04
Abstract
Individuals with dyslexia have subtle difficulties with basic auditory processing, in particular with respect to amplitude envelope structure. These auditory difficulties appear to reduce sensitivity to speech rhythm and prosody, and affect the syllabic segmentation of the speech stream. In non-dyslexics, visual cues to speech can greatly enhance speech intelligibility. This enhancement is most marked under conditions where the auditory input is less reliable (eg. in a noisy environment). Accordingly, visual input may aid prosodic perception in developmental dyslexia. In this experiment, we asked adults with dyslexia to detect stressed syllables when they heard spoken tokens either with synchronous delivery of congruent visual information or in the absence of this information. Two different visual analogues for the amplitude envelope of each token were created by transforming auditory intensity values into 2D motion in visual space. Dyslexic and control participants made same-different judgments about the placement of stress in pairs of 4-syllable words such as ‘CAterpillar’ and ‘DANdelion’. Their performance in the baseline auditory-only condition was compared with performance in the two bimodal conditions. Testing is ongoing, but results are expected to shed light on whether adults with dyslexia and subtle auditory processing difficulties can benefit from cross-modal support in the form of dynamic visual displays.