[Prosody and reading: Temporal and melodic characteristics in the dyslexic child in reading and narration]

Dyslexia is widely associated to a massive phonological awareness deficit. This deficit leads to difficulties in grapheme to phoneme conversions in reading and difficulties in words and sentences productions. The origin of the phonological deficit is partially explained by the magnocellular, cerebellar and articulatory theories. Recently, an increasing number of studies demonstrated the relationship between prosody and reading and, more specifically, the potential key role of suprasegmental phonology in the healthy development of phonological representations. The aim of this study is to explore part of prosodic features in dyslexics and normal developing children in reading and narration tasks, in French. We examined reading accuracy, reading rate, pauses frequency and duration, inter-pausal units (IPUs) duration and instantaneous variations of F0. Results show correct decoding skills for all subjects but a lack of automation of this procedure for dyslexics. Differences in pauses frequency and duration, IPUS duration and F0 variations observed between dyslexics and controls confirm the link between prosodic reading and automaticity. The longer pause duration in narrative form a temporal feature of dyslexic's production. This temporal characteristic reflects the cognitive cost done by a speech generation task involving lexical selection, syntactic planning and articulatory programming processes. This result is a first step towards evidence of a suprasegmental phonological deficit in spoken language that could be an early marker of later reading difficulties.