Phonological Difficulties attested in Infants at Family Risk of Dyslexia

This study investigated the speech sound discrimination abilities of Dutch 6-10-month-old infants at family risk of dyslexia (FR), i.e. infants with at least one dyslexic parent. The Hybrid Visual Fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007) was used to assess discrimination of 197 FR infants (6-month-olds: n= 93; 8-month-old: n= 46, 10-month-old: n= 58). They were tested on native (/a:-/e:/) and non-native (/æ/-/ɛ/) vowel contrasts. During habituation, infants were exposed to one of the vowels (e.g. /a:/ or /e:/). The test phase involved four alternating (e.g. /a:/-/e:/) and eight non-alternating (e.g. /a:/-/a:/) trials. Previous results with non-FR infants has shown that they could discriminate both contrasts, although there was a lack of discrimination for the 8-month-olds. Mixed effect modelling showed that the FR infants could discriminate the native contrast at all three ages. In contrast, the non-native contrast was not discriminated at any of the ages. These findings indicate speech perception difficulties in FR infants, which could be a precursor of subsequent phonological processing problems.
This research was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant nr. 360-70-270.