Exploring dyslexics' phonological deficit III: foreign speech perception and production

This study investigates French dyslexic and control adult participants' ability to perceive and produce two different non-native contrasts (one segmental and one prosodic), across several conditions varying short-term memory load. For this purpose, we selected Korean plosive voicing (whose categories conflict with French ones) as the segmental contrast and lexical stress as the prosodic contrast (French does not use contrastive lexical stress). We also used a French (native) segmental contrast as a control. Tasks were either auditory discrimination or repetition of CVCV nonsense words. Short-term memory load was varied by presenting the stimuli either in isolation, in sequences of two, or in sequences of three. Our results show overall few differences between dyslexic and control participants. In particular, dyslexic participants performed similarly to controls in all tasks involving Korean plosives, whether in discrimination or in production, and regardless of short-term memory load. However, some group differences emerged with respect to lexical stress, in the discrimination task at greater short-term memory load. Various analyses suggest that dyslexic participants' difficulties are due to the meta-phonological nature of the task and to short-term memory load.