Ability for voice recognition is a marker for dyslexia in children

A recent voice recognition experiment conducted by Perrachione, Del Tufo, and Gabrieli (2011) revealed that, in normal adult readers, the accuracy at identifying human voices was better in the participants' mother tongue than in an unfamiliar language, while this difference was absent in a group of adults with dyslexia. This pattern favored a view of dyslexia as due to "fundamentally impoverished native-language phonological representations." To further examine this issue, we conducted two voice recognition experiments, one with children with/without dyslexia, and the other with adults with/without dyslexia. Results revealed that children/adults with dyslexia were less accurate at identifying voices than normal readers and, importantly, this effect was independent of language. These data are more consistent with the assumption of dyslexia as due to a deficit in multisensory integration rather than a deficit based on impoverished native-language phonologically based representations.