Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 100, Issue 3, July 2006, Pages B32-B42
Cognition

Brief article
Specific phonological impairments in dyslexia revealed by eyetracking

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.09.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Phonological deficits in dyslexia are typically assessed using metalinguistic tasks vulnerable to extraneous factors such as attention and memory. The present work takes the novel approach of measuring phonology using eyetracking. Eye movements of dyslexic children were monitored during an auditory word recognition task in which target items in a display (e.g., candle) were accompanied by distractors sharing a cohort (candy) or rhyme (sandal). Like controls, dyslexics showed slower recognition times when a cohort distractor was present than in a baseline condition with only phonologically unrelated distractors. However, unlike controls, dyslexic children did not show slowed recognition of targets with a rhyme distractor, suggesting they had not encoded rhyme relationships. This was further explored in an overt phonological awareness test of cohort and rhyme. Surprisingly, dyslexics showed normal rhyme performance but poorer judgment of initial sounds on these overt tests. The results implicate impaired knowledge of rhyme information in dyslexia; however they also indicate that testing methodology plays a critical role in how such problems are identified.

Section snippets

Participants

School-age children were recruited from schools in the London, Ontario area. Recruitment and testing procedures were approved by the University of Western Ontario office of Research Ethics. Eight dyslexic children in the third and fourth grades were tested (age M=8;9, range 8;1–9;5); one additional child was unable to complete the eyetracking task and was excluded from analyses. Children in the dyslexic group scored below the 25th percentile (M=15.63, SD=7.58) on the Word Identification subtask

Reading and IQ measures

As expected, dyslexic children scored lower than controls on word reading ability (WRMT-R Word Identification), t(15)=14.30, P<.001, nonword reading (percentile rank: controls, M=55.11, SD=17.82; dyslexics, M=10.00, SD=7.43; t(15)=6.95, P<.001) and phoneme deletion (grade level: controls, M=3.93, SD=.95; dyslexics, M=2.44, SD=.44; t(15)=4.23, P<.001). However, the dyslexic and control groups did not differ on the WISC-III measures (Block Design: t(15)=−.19, ns; Vocabulary t(15)=1.44, ns).

Eyetracking

Mean

Discussion

We compared phonological processing abilities of children with dyslexia to those of normally developing same-aged controls. Previous studies have tended to rely on phonological awareness tests to assess phonology in dyslexia, which can be undermined by attendant factors related to children's difficulty understanding instructions as well as attention and memory limitations. Results of the eyetracking task indicated that under normal circumstances, auditory word identification in dyslexic

Conclusion

Phonological awareness tests have long been an important source of information about the underlying nature of phonological deficits in dyslexia (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1983). Indeed, considerable debate has focused on whether the locus of this problem is in their representation of individual segments (Fowler, 1991; Muter et al., 1998; Nation & Hulme, 1997) or at the level of rhymes (Bryant, 1997; Goswami, 1999; Kirtley et al., 1989). The present results suggest some caution in

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research to MFJ and the Ontario Graduate Scholarships for Science and Technology to ASD.

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