AA3 remediation dyslexia

AA3 Remediation of allophonic perception in dyslexia

Responsible: Willy Serniclaes

Description

A central question of Axe 4 is to understand how language-specific mechanisms are acquired during perceptual development. For speech perception, universal features are normally replaced by language-specific features (i.e. phonemic features) during the first year of life (Hoonhorst et al., 2009, J.Exp.Child Psych.). Different investigations suggest that the acquisition of such language-specific features is hampered in children with developmental dyslexia. Specifically, different studies suggest that dyslexic children perceive speech with allophonic units instead of phonemic units (Serniclaes et al., 2001, J.Lang. Speech Res.; Serniclaes et al., 2004, J.Exp.Child Psych.; Bogliotti et al., 2008, J.Exp.Child Psych.; Dufor et al., 2009, NeuroImage; Noordenbos 2012a, Res. Developt. Dis.; 2012b, Neuropsychologia; 2013, Neuroreport). Illiterate adults do not exhibit allophonic perception (Serniclaes et al., 2005, Cognition) which suggests that it is the cause rather than the consequence of dyslexia. The consequence of perceiving speech with allophonic units is to disturb the establishment of grapheme-phoneme correspondences which play a determinant role in reading acquisition (Sprenger-Charolles et al., 2006, Psychology Press). The purpose of this workpackage is to develop methods for remediation allophonic perception and assessing the implication of such remediation on reading performances. We have already shown that training SLI children to use the voicing boundary that is phonemic in French is possible with a discriminant fading method (Collet et al., 2013, Applied Psycholinguistics) and that training to perceive this phonemic boundary leads to an improvement of phonemic awareness (Collet et al., 2012, Res. Developt. Dis.). We now plan to see whether this speech training method also produces an improvement in reading  performances in different groups of dyslexic children (with/without SLI; with/ without visual deficits). In this purpose, the speech training method will be compared with a visual training method.  We hope to evidence possible synergies between the methods, and that might be useful for developing more comprehensive intervention programs.

Publications

Collet, G., Colin, C., Serniclaes, W., Hoonhorst, I., Markessis, E., Deltenre, P., & Leybaert, J. (2013). Changes in voicing perception by adult French speakers after identification training.  Applied Psycholinguistics.
 

Linked Projects

Cécile Collin, Gregory Collet, José Morais & Régine Kolinski, UNESCOG, Université Libre de Bruxelles http://unescog.org/index.php

Sylviane Valdois Rachel Zoubrinetzky & Eric Binet, Laboratoire de Psychologie et de Neurocognition, Université Pierre Mendès France, Grenoble. http://web.upmf-grenoble.fr/lpnc/Sylviane-Valdois