Auditory illusions as evidence for a role of the syllable in adult developmental dyslexics.

This study investigated whether adult developmental dyslexics differ from normal controls in early stages of spoken language processing that in turn might be related to specific reading difficulties. Subjects were required to detect prespecified targets under dichotic presentation of auditory nonword pairs. The stimuli were made such that segment migrations were possible. The potential contribution of phonetic features, as well as that of phonemes and syllables, was investigated. The results showed that dyslexics had specifically more syllable-based migrations. This result is discussed in the context of well-documented metaphonological deficits and memory problems of poor readers.