Neural sensitivity to within- and across-category voice onset time contrasts in 4- to 5-year-olds at risk for developmental dyslexia

Abstract Phonological (speech sound) processing difficulties, including challenges with phoneme awareness, are core characteristics of developmental dyslexia. Categorical perception (CP) tasks, which assess the ability to organize the continuous acoustic speech signal into phoneme categories (e.g., /b/ vs /p/), provide insight into these challenges. CP is robust in humans, yet data from children with dyslexia are contradictory. While some studies report reduced CP in dyslexia, others report enhanced within-category discrimination, implying allophonic perception (sensitivity to phonetic variation within a category boundary). This study examines neural responses in a CP task among 4- to 5-year-old children with (at-risk, AR) and without (not-at-risk, NAR) familial risk for dyslexia, using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component. AR children exhibited MMNs to both within- and across-category contrasts, while NAR children demonstrated MMN only for across-category contrasts. These findings, consistent with allophonic perception in pre-reading AR children, align with the temporal sampling theory of developmental dyslexia.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Applied Psycholinguistics

• Publication date

  2025-11-10

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1017/S0142716425100271
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Binaural Temporal Fine Structure Sensitivity for Children With Developmental Dyslexia.

  2025cited by this paper
• Phonetic perceptual reorganization across the first year of life: Looking back.

  2024cited by this paper
• Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life

  2023cited by this paper
• The myth of categorical perception.

  2022cited by this paper
• Later but Not Weaker: Neural Categorization of Native Vowels of Children at Familial Risk of Dyslexia

  2022cited by this paper
• Is there evidence for a noisy computation deficit in developmental dyslexia?

  2022cited by this paper
• Decoding of Speech Information using EEG in Children with Dyslexia: Less Accurate Low-Frequency Representations of Speech, Not “Noisy” Representations

  2022cited by this paper
• Novel word learning deficits in infants at family risk for dyslexia.

  2020cited by this paper
• The Maryland Analysis of Developmental EEG (MADE) Pipeline

  2020cited by this paper
• Allophonic perception of VOT contrasts in Spanish children with dyslexia

  2020cited by this paper
• Auditory Processing Deficit in Individuals with Dyslexia: A Meta-Analysis of Mismatch Negativity.

  2020influential reference
• Defining and understanding dyslexia: past, present and future

  2020cited by this paper
• Delayed development of phonological constancy in toddlers at family risk for dyslexia.

  2019cited by this paper
• Adjusting ADJUST: Optimizing the ADJUST Algorithm for Pediatric Data Using Geodesic Nets

  2019cited by this paper
• Sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infancy and vocabulary development at 3 years: A significant relationship.

  2019cited by this paper
• Reading ability and phoneme categorization

  2018cited by this paper
• The temporal modulation structure of illiterate versus literate adult speech

  2018cited by this paper
• How to capitalize on a priori contrasts in linear (mixed) models: A tutorial

  2018cited by this paper
• Atypical cortical entrainment to speech in the right hemisphere underpins phonemic deficits in dyslexia

  2018cited by this paper
• Enhanced Sensitivity to Subphonemic Segments in Dyslexia: A New Instance of Allophonic Perception

  2018cited by this paper
• Mothers speak differently to infants at-risk for dyslexia.

  2018cited by this paper
• A Neural Basis for Phonological Awareness? An Oscillatory Temporal-Sampling Perspective

  2018cited by this paper
• lmerTest Package: Tests in Linear Mixed Effects Models

  2017cited by this paper
• Phonological abilities in literacy-impaired children: Brain potentials reveal deficient phoneme discrimination, but intact prosodic processing

  2016cited by this paper
• Neural encoding of the speech envelope by children with developmental dyslexia

  2016cited by this paper
• Programming with ggplot2

  2016cited by this paper
• Least-Squares Means: The R Package lsmeans

  2016cited by this paper
• Digital filter design for electrophysiological data--a practical approach.

  2015influential reference
• The Categorical Perception Deficit in Dyslexia: A Meta-Analysis

  2015cited by this paper
• Sensory theories of developmental dyslexia: three challenges for research

  2014cited by this paper
• Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4

  2014influential reference
• Impaired auditory sampling in dyslexia: further evidence from combined fMRI and EEG

  2013cited by this paper
• Allophonic mode of speech perception in Dutch children at risk for dyslexia: a longitudinal study.

  2012influential reference
• Evidence for the Late MMN as a Neurophysiological Endophenotype for Dyslexia

  2012cited by this paper
• The Relationship Between Learning to Read and Language-Specific Speech Perception: Maturation versus Experience

  2012cited by this paper
• Cortical oscillations and speech processing: emerging computational principles and operations

  2012cited by this paper
• Neural evidence of allophonic perception in children at risk for dyslexia.

  2012influential reference
• Investigating speech perception in children with dyslexia: is there evidence of a consistent deficit in individuals?

  2011cited by this paper
• Is auditory discrimination mature by middle childhood? A study using time-frequency analysis of mismatch responses from 7 years to adulthood

  2011cited by this paper
• A temporal sampling framework for developmental dyslexia.

  2011influential reference
• Preschool impairments in auditory processing and speech perception uniquely predict future reading problems.

  2011cited by this paper
• Maturation of Speech Discrimination in 4- to 7-Yr-Old Children as Indexed by Event-Related Potential Mismatch Responses

  2010cited by this paper
• Abnormal pattern of cortical speech feature discrimination in 6-year-old children at risk for dyslexia.

  2010cited by this paper
• FASTER: Fully Automated Statistical Thresholding for EEG artifact Rejection.

  2010cited by this paper
• Brain mechanisms in early language acquisition.

  2010cited by this paper
• FieldTrip: Open Source Software for Advanced Analysis of MEG, EEG, and Invasive Electrophysiological Data

  2010influential reference
• Perception of tone and aspiration contrasts in Chinese children with dyslexia.

  2009cited by this paper
• Early language development of children at familial risk of dyslexia: speech perception and production.

  2009cited by this paper
• Age-related differences in distraction and reorientation in an auditory task.

  2009cited by this paper
• Discrimination of speech sounds by children with dyslexia: comparisons with chronological age and reading level controls.

  2008cited by this paper
• The mismatch negativity (MMN) in basic research of central auditory processing: a review.

  2007influential reference
• The development of phonetic representation in bilingual and monolingual infants

  2007cited by this paper
• Nonparametric statistical testing of EEG- and MEG-data.

  2007cited by this paper
• The contribution of AERPs (MMN and LDN) to studying temporal vs. linguistic processing deficits in children with reading difficulties.

  2006cited by this paper
• [Genetics of dyslexia].

  2006cited by this paper
• Neurophysiological Indexes of Speech Processing Deficits in Children with Specific Language Impairment

  2005cited by this paper
• Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory.

  2005influential reference
• Categorical perception of speech stimuli in children at risk for reading difficulty.

  2004cited by this paper
• Specific reading disability (dyslexia): what have we learned in the past four decades?

  2004cited by this paper
• Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code

  2004cited by this paper
• EEGLAB: an open source toolbox for analysis of single-trial EEG dynamics including independent component analysis.

  2004influential reference
• The fragile nature of the speech-perception deficit in dyslexia: natural vs synthetic speech.

  2004cited by this paper
• Allophonic mode of speech perception in dyslexia.

  2004cited by this paper
• Altered responses to tone and phoneme mismatch in kindergartners at familial dyslexia risk

  2003cited by this paper
• Why theories about developmental dyslexia require developmental designs.

  2003cited by this paper
• Automatic processing of tones and speech stimuli in children with specific language impairment

  2002cited by this paper
• Identification and discrimination of voicing and place-of-articulation in developmental dyslexia

  2001cited by this paper
• Mismatch Negativity and Late Discriminative Negativity in Investigating Speech Perception and Learning in Children and Infants

  2001cited by this paper
• Auditory processing and dyslexia: evidence for a specific speech processing deficit

  1998cited by this paper
• Speech perception and the discrimination of brief auditory cues in reading disabled children.

  1989cited by this paper
• The Developmental Lag Hypothesis in Reading: Longitudinal and Matched Reading-Level Comparisons.

  1988cited by this paper
• Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously

  1979cited by this paper
• Auditory and phonetic coding of the cues for speech: Discrimination of the [r-l] distinction by young infants

  1975cited by this paper
• The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries.

  1957cited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.