Dyslexia Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Dyslexia, including details on learning, reading, education, teaching, treatment.

Auditory perceptual grouping and attention in dyslexia.

Petkov CI, O'connor KN, Benmoshe G, Baynes K, Sutter ML

Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.

Despite dyslexia affecting a large number of people, the mechanisms underlying the disorder remain undetermined. There are numerous theories about the origins of dyslexia. Many of these relate dyslexia to low-level, sensory temporal processing deficits. Another group of theories attributes dyslexia to language-specific impairments. Here, we show that dyslexics perform worse than controls on an auditory perceptual grouping task. The results show differences in performance between the groups that depend on sound frequency and not solely on parameters related to temporal processing. Performance on this task suggests that dyslexics' deficits may result from impaired attentional control mechanisms. Such deficits are neither modality nor language-specific and may help to reconcile differences between theories of dyslexia.

Published 4 July 2005 in Brain Res Cogn Brain Res, 24(2): 343-54.
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