The role of phonological awareness, speech perception, and auditory temporal processing for dyslexia

There is strong evidence that auditory processing plays a major role in the etiology of dyslexia. Auditory temporal processing of non-speech stimuli, speech perception, and phonological awareness have been shown to be influen tial in reading and spelling development. However, the relationship between these variables remains unclear. In order to analyze the influence of thes e three auditory processing levels on spelling, 19 dyslexic and 15 control children were examined. Significant group differences were found for all sp eech variables, but not for any non-speech variable. Structural equation mo deling resulted in a fairly simple model with direct paths to the respectiv e next lower level. One additional path from preattentive speech processing to spelling had to be included in order to improve the model fit. These re sults strengthen the role of speech and phonological processing for the eti ology in dyslexia.