The role of visual and auditory temporal processing for Chinese children with developmental dyslexia

This study examined temporal processing in relation to Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. The performances of 26 Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia on tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological, and phonological awareness were compared with those of 26 reading level ability controls (RL) and 26 chronological age controls (CA). Dyslexic children performed worse than the CA group but similar to the RL group on measures of accurate processing of auditory and visual-order stimuli, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and phonological awareness and a minority performed worse on the two temporal processing tasks. However, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that visual but not auditory temporal processing contributed unique variance to Chinese character recognition even with other cognitive measures controlled, suggesting it may be as important a correlate of reading ability in Chinese as in alphabetic scripts.