Children with dyslexia are slow to articulate a single speech gesture

In addition to their well-established problems in phonological processing, children with dyslexia show reduced speed of articulation. Two groups of children with dyslexia, mean ages 13 and 16 years, participated together with two groups of normally achieving children matched for age and IQ, with 33 participants in total. Participants were asked to articulate repeatedly, as fast as they could, either a single articulatory gesture /p/ /t/ or /k/ or the sequence 'putuku'. The waveforms generated were analysed in two ways; the time per gesture excluding inter-articulatory pauses (articulatory duration); and the mean time including the pauses (gesture duration). No age effects were found, but dyslexic groups were significantly slower on all tests. Deficits were greater in relative magnitude for gesture duration than articulatory duration. The results suggest that children with dyslexia have significant problems in articulation, not only in gesture planning, but also in the speeded production of single articulatory gestures.