Seck M'ballo

Université Paris7 ARP labo de phonétique

9. speech acquisition, learning and teaching

Reading and categorial perception decifit in dysphasic children of 7 to 11 years old

This experiment is aimed at examining reading and categorical perception in children affected by dysphasia. The study is established by 10 dysphasics french-speaking children (mean 7 years old) who does not present any sensory-motor or psychologic disability. The control group was selected from a longitudinal study founded by Dr Marc Delahaie. The 191 french-speaking children, at 6 years old who does not present in any sensory-motor or psychologic disability also. The categorial perception test is established for the discrimination data. The stimulus was represented by pairs. The work for the child was to give answer ‘same’ or ‘different’ by tapping two different color on the computer keyboard. For the reading test, we have two possibilities: First, we have simple test sound – letter, second possibility, we have test with digraph term for the real words. For the pseudo words we have same situation. The results suggest that, dysphasic children present difficulties in categorical perception compared to control children of the same lexical old. The results of the reading test showed a significative difference between the dysphasics and the control group. For the words, we have obtained 45% correct responses (SD = 3.7) and the dysphasics obtained 35% (SD =3.3). For the pseudowords, we have obtained 38% correct responses (SD = 3.7) and the dysphasics obtained 10% (SD = 0.8). We observed that the control group has an increase of discrimination to the S2S3 inter-categorial pairs, which supports the categorial discrimination. Control group has a peak above 70%, while the dysphasics stay to 50% by chance. They pave the way for further studies on the relationship between the categorical perception and reading acquisition of dysphasia.