An experimental comparison between rival theories of rapid automatized naming performance and its relationship to reading.

Two studies investigated the degree to which the relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance and reading development is driven by shared phonological processes. Study 1 assessed RAN, phonological awareness, and reading performance in 1010 7- to 10-year-olds. Results showed that RAN deficits occurred in the absence of phonological awareness deficits. These were accompanied by modest reading delays. In structural equation modeling, solutions where RAN was subsumed within a phonological processing factor did not provide a good fit to the data, suggesting that processes outside phonology may drive RAN performance and its association with reading. Study 2 investigated Kail's proposal that speed of processing underlies this relationship. Children with single RAN deficits showed slower speed of processing than did closely matched controls performing normally on RAN. However, regression analysis revealed that RAN made a unique contribution to reading even after accounting for processing speed. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Amplitude envelope onsets and developmental dyslexia: A new hypothesis.

A core difficulty in developmental dyslexia is the accurate specification and neural representation of speech. We argue that a likely perceptual cause of this difficulty is a deficit in the perceptual experience of rhythmic timing. Speech rhythm is one of the earliest cues used by infants to discriminate syllables and is determined principally by the acoustic structure of amplitude modulation at relatively low rates in the signal. We show significant differences between dyslexic and normally reading children, and between young early readers and normal developers, in amplitude envelope onset detection. We further show that individual differences in sensitivity to the shape of amplitude modulation account for 25% of the variance in reading and spelling acquisition even after controlling for individual differences in age, nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary. A possible causal explanation dependent on perceptual-center detection and the onset-rime representation of syllables is discussed.