The association between temporal processing and reading deficits in children with developmental dyslexia

Children with developmental dyslexia and children without reading difficulties performed several perceptual temporal processing tasks and reading tasks to determine if performance on perceptual temporal processing tasks can: a) differentiate between children with dyslexia and children with average reading skills; b) differentiate between dyslexia subtypes based on orthographic and phonological reading skills. Children with dyslexia were impaired on two of the three perceptual tasks, global motion perception and dichotic pitch tone identification, relative to the age-matched control group. The reading tasks were all positively correlated, in the dyslexia group, regardless of whether the task assessed orthographic,or phonological processing. Global motion and dichotic pitch identification were both significant predictors of orthographic word reading in all the children. None of the tasks were significant predictors of phonological word reading. The current findings suggest that orthographic reading deficits in dyslexia are associated with impaired visual and auditory temporal processing.