Cross-linguistic perception of pitch of Chinese dyslexic children

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between perception of basic auditory processing measures, detection of suprasegmental features and bilingual literacy among Hong Kong children with and without reading difficulties. Sixty native Cantonese speakers with the average age of 7; 11 participated in the study. Forty-four children were age-matched controls and 16 of them were diagnosed to have dyslexia. A series of tasks assessing auditory processing ability, detection of suprasegmental features of both Chinese and English and literacy were given all participants. Tone detection was the strongest predictor to all the scores of Chinese literacy task. There was no significant difference in sensitivity to English prosody task between groups. For auditory processing measures, significant differences between groups were only found in 1 rise and intensity task. Regression analysis showed that auditory threshold of rise time discrimination predicted 20% unique variance of sensitivity to tone detection. We concluded that detection of lexical tone in Chinese was an important linguistic marker that may help diagnose children with reading difficulties in Chinese. Normal children made use of intensity cues to detect rise time. Suggestions were also made to improve the validity of English prosody sensitivity task.