Neural sensitivity to within- and across-category voice onset time contrasts in 4- to5-year-olds at risk for developmental dyslexia

Antonia Götz; Varghese Peter; Marina Kalashnikova; Denis Burnham; Usha Goswami

doi:10.1017/S0142716425100271

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Neural sensitivity to within- and across-category voice onset time contrasts in 4- to5-year-olds at risk for developmental dyslexia

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Neural sensitivity to within- and across-category voice onset time contrasts in 4- to5-year-olds at risk for developmental dyslexia

Antonia Götz, Varghese Peter, Marina Kalashnikova, Denis Burnham and Usha Goswami

Applied Psycholinguistics, Vol.46, pp.1-18

2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716425100271

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Abstract

Applied and developmental psychology

Sensory processes, perception and performance

Psycholinguistics (incl. speech production and comprehension)

Expanding knowledge in psychology

Categorical perception

dyslexia

temporal sampling theory

voice onset time

Phonological (speech sound) processing difficulties, including challenges with phoneme awareness, are core characteristics of developmental dyslexia. Categorical perception (CP) tasks, which assess the ability to organize the continuous acoustic speech signal into phoneme categories (e.g., /b/ vs /p/), provide insight into these challenges. CP is robust in humans, yet data from children with dyslexia are contradictory. While some studies report reduced CP in dyslexia, others report enhanced within-category discrimination, implying allophonic perception (sensitivity to phonetic variation within a category boundary). This study examines neural responses in a CP task among 4-to 5-year-old children with (at-risk, AR) and without (not-at-risk, NAR) familial risk for dyslexia, using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component. AR children exhibited MMNs to both within-and across-category contrasts, while NAR children demonstrated MMN only for across-category contrasts. These findings, consistent with allophonic perception in pre-reading AR children, align with the temporal sampling theory of developmental dyslexia.

Details

Title: Neural sensitivity to within- and across-category voice onset time contrasts in 4- to5-year-olds at risk for developmental dyslexia
Authors: Antonia Götz (Corresponding Author) - Western Sydney University
Varghese Peter (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Health
Marina Kalashnikova (Author) - Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
Denis Burnham (Author) - Western Sydney University
Usha Goswami (Author) - University of Cambridge
Publication details: Applied Psycholinguistics, Vol.46, pp.1-18
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date published: 2025
DOI: 10.1017/S0142716425100271
ISSN: 1469-1817; 0142-7164
Copyright note: © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Data Availability: All data reported here are available upon request to Marina Kalashnikova at m.kalashnikova@bcbl.eu.
Grants: The seeds of literacy in infancy: empirical specification of the acoustic determinants of language acquisition, DP110105123, Australian Research Council (Australia, Canberra) - ARC
Organisation Unit: Healthy Ageing Research Cluster; School of Health - Psychology
Language: English
Record Identifier: 991181745902621
Output Type: Journal article

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