Children with speech delay (SD) have underlying deficits in speech perception that may be related to reading skill. Children with SD and children with dyslexia have previously shown deficits for distinct perceptual characteristics, including segmental acoustic structure and global acoustic structure. In this study, 35 children (ages 7-9 years) with SD, SD + dyslexia, and/or typically developing were presented with a vocoded speech recognition task to investigate their perception of global acoustic speech structure. Findings revealed no differences in vocoded speech recognition between groups, regardless of SD or dyslexia status. These findings suggest that in children with SD, co-occurring dyslexia does not appear to influence speech perception of global acoustic structure. We discuss these findings in the context of previous research literature and also discuss limitations of the current study and future directions for follow-up investigations.

Children with speech delay (SD) have underlying deficits in speech perception that may be related to reading skill. Children with SD and children with dyslexia have previously shown deficits for distinct perceptual characteristics, including segmental acoustic structure and global acoustic structure. In this study, 35 children (ages 7-9 years) with SD, SD + dyslexia, and/or typically developing were presented with a vocoded speech recognition task to investigate their perception of global acoustic speech structure. Findings revealed no differences in vocoded speech recognition between groups, regardless of SD or dyslexia status. These findings suggest that in children with SD, co-occurring dyslexia does not appear to influence speech perception of global acoustic structure. We discuss these findings in the context of previous research literature and also discuss limitations of the current study and future directions for follow-up investigations.

Perceptual deficits related to phonology in children with speech delay (SD) and children with dyslexia have been identified in separate lines of research. However, there has only been a small number of studies that have investigated the perceptual deficits of children with SD and/or dyslexia in the same study to better understand the overlap of their speech perception abilities. Children with SD have previously shown deficits perceiving speech stimuli that is acoustically sparse, particularly when stimuli contain speech sounds they do not produce correctly. Yet in contrast to children with dyslexia, children with SD are better able to recover linguistic structure from speech stimuli that preserves global acoustic structure in the absence of spectral detail. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to further investigate how children with SD, dyslexia, SD + dyslexia, and typically developing (TD) peers perceive different types of speech. To do this, we used both vocoded speech and sine-wave speech recognition tasks. In this study, 40 children (ages 7-10 years) with SD, dyslexia, SD + dyslexia, and/or typically developing were presented with both sine-wave and vocoded speech recognition tasks to investigate their speech perception. Findings revealed no differences between groups for both the sine-wave and vocoded speech perception tasks, regardless of SD and/or dyslexia status. Increasing the number of participants or utilizing more sensitive speech perception tasks may provide clinically applicable resources for assessment or intervention. We discuss these findings in the context of previous research literature and also discuss limitations of the current study and future directions for follow-up investigations.