Rise time perception in children with reading and combined reading and language difficulties

Using a non-speech-specific measure of prosody, rise time perception, Goswami and her colleagues have found that individuals with dyslexia perform significantly worse than nonimpaired readers. Studies have also found that children and adults with specific language impairment were impaired on these tasks. Despite the high comorbidity of these disorders, only one study has assessed rise time sensitivity in children with comorbid reading and oral language difficulties. The authors further examined rise time sensitivity in children with both reading and oral language difficulties. They compared performance on rise time perception tasks between 18 children with reading difficulties, 15 children with combined reading and oral language difficulties, and 17 chronological age-matched controls. The authors found a significant interaction between group and performance on auditory tasks. Further tests revealed that chronological age-matched controls were significantly better on the rise time measures compared to both groups of children with reading difficulties. Performance between the groups of children with reading difficulties did not significantly differ.