Thursday, March 01, 2007

Phonological and auditory temporal processing theories of dyslexia

I just skimmed the following "in press" article and found the introduction and discussion to be excellent overviews of the phonological deficit and auditory temporal processing theories of severe reading disability (dyslexia). Regardless of the interpretation of the results, and the small sample size, the introduction and discussion sections are worth reading simply to become more familiar with the central features of the phonological deficit vs auditory temporal processing theories of dyslexia.
  • Boets, B., Wouters J., van Wieringen A. & Ghesquiere, P. (in press). Auditory processing, speech perception and phonological ability in pre-school children at high-risk for dyslexia: A longitudinal study of the auditory temporal processing theory. Neuropsychologia. (click here to view)
Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

powered by performancing firefox

2 comments:

Liz Ditz said...

It's Liz from I Speak of Dreams.

Thanks for posting this.

One note of interest to me: one faction of the dyslexia-denying squad says that dyslexia is unknown outside of the English-speaking world, and therefore dyslexia is a junk diagnosis.

I observe that the authors are all Belgian, and therefore I suspect the children studied were Belgian. The paper does not specifically state which language (French or Flemish) the children spoke.

This passage, from the discussion, is important too:

Overall, these findings substantiate that reading and writing is a complex multifaceted activity that involves a dynamic interplay of multiple sensory and cognitive-linguistic processes, moderated by various unspecified environmental or higher-order cognitive influences. Deficits at any level might interfere with normal literacy development. Comprehensive theories like the phonological theory, the auditory temporal processing theory or the visual magnocellular theory are nevertheless important and necessary to guide and stimulate scientific research, but it is an illusion to expect them to explain the full complexity of literacy development. Together with the growing awareness that there does not exist one uniform manifestation of dyslexia, researchers also start to realise that no single all-embracing cause ortheory will be found. In line with this evolution, one can also notice a broader conceptual change from a deterministic single cause model of developmental and learning disorders towards a probabilistic and multifactor model (Pennington,2006).

Pennington, B.F. (2006). From single to multiple deficit models of developmental disorders. Cognition, 101, 385–413.

I'm not a researcher, but a lay person with a family member affected by dyslexia. The more I learn, the more the multifactor model aligns with my observations.

Kevin McGrew said...

Liz...thanks for your recent multiple comments. With regard to the article that outlined the phonological and auditory temporal processing theories, I've just skimmed another that does a good job of describing an apparent visual-based theory. I hope to post something re: this article soon.

Kevin