Speech perception and the discrimination of brief auditory cues in reading disabled children.

The processing of speech and nonspeech sounds by 23 reading disabled children and their age- and sex-matched controls was examined in a task requiring them to identify and report the order of pairs of stimuli. Reading disabled children were impaired in making judgments with very brief tones and with stop consonant syllables at short interstimulus intervals (ISI's). They had no unusual difficulty with vowel stimuli, vowel stimuli in a white noise background, or very brief visual figures. Poor performance on the tones and stop consonants appears to be due to specific difficulty in processing very brief auditory cues. The reading disabled children also showed deficits in the perception of naturally produced words, less sharply defined category boundaries, and a greater reliance on context in making phoneme identifications. The results suggest a perceptual deficit in some reading disabled children, which interferes with the processing of phonological information.