Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Our work has suggested that there were significant links between Chinese children’s perception of auditory frequency, lexical tone and their reading abilities. In this talk, we will review the cooperation with Dr Yu Tsao for over three years. From the behavioral data, our study found that poor auditory frequency processing may associate with Chinese developmental dyslexia and lexical tone identification problems. In support of the phonological deficit hypothesis, what underlies phonological deficit is likely to be auditory-basis. Particularly, Chinese-speaking children with reading difficulties were significantly related to frequency-modulated sweep identification. Lexical tone awareness was significantly associated with basic auditory frequency processing tasks. The biological finding indicated that auditory sensory processing was affected by both the duration and the direction of a frequency sweep. Sensitivity to changes in sound duration and frequency may be crucial for the processing of supra-segmental features in Chinese speech as well as Chinese word recognition. Therefore, we suggest to provide an assistive listening technology and listening training to help these children with Chinese learning difficulties. The examples will be demonstrated in this talk.