Mismatch negativity in children with dyslexia speaking Indian languages

Several studies in the past have found that phonological processing is abnormal in children with dyslexia. Phonological processing depends on the phonological rules of the language learnt. Western languages do not have a good phoneme to grapheme correspondence while many of the Indian languages do have it. Also phonological rules of western languages are different from that of Indian languages. Thus it would be erroneous to generalize the results of phonological processing obtained on children speaking western languages to those speaking Indian languages. Hence the present study was aimed to investigate the auditory processing in children with dyslexia who spoke and studied Indian languages.

Standard group comparison design was used in the study. The study was conducted on fifteen children with dyslexia and fifteen control children. Mismatch negativity was elicited for speech and tonal stimuli. Results obtained on the clinical group were compared with that of control group using mixed design Analysis of variance. Children in both the groups were native speakers of Kannada (a south Indian language).

A subgroup of children showed abnormalities in the processing of speech and/or tonal stimuli. Speech elicited mismatch negativity showed greater abnormalities than that of tonal stimuli. Though higher for spectral contrasts, processing deficits were also shown for durational contrasts.

Inspite of having different phonological rules and good phoneme-grapheme correspondence in Indian languages, children with dyslexia do have deficits in processing both spectral and durational cues.