Organization of speech in Chinese-reading dyslexic children: Aspiration and lexical tone

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to highlight lexical tone and aspiration, two contrastive dimensions in Cantonese speech perception, as correlates of dyslexia in a sample of 8-year-old Chinese-reading children. Our results showed that the dyslexic children: (1) performed less satisfactorily than age-matched controls on phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and lexical decision, and (2) perceived tonal and aspiration contrasts less categorically than age-matched controls. Result (1) is generally consistent with previous findings; result (2) reinforces the role of speech perception in dyslexia by underscoring the importance of how tonal and aspiration contrasts, which are not represented in the Chinese orthography and certainly unavailable in English speech, are processed in a categorical perception context, which has not been investigated in relation to dyslexia.