RESUMO
Some types of developmental dyslexia (DD) are associated with morphology. Deep DD leads to morphological and semantic errors, and possible comorbidity with syntactic deficits; phonological-output-buffer DD causes problems in decoding longer morphologically complex words. In addition, cross-linguistic studies highlight the effects of morphological awareness on reading accuracy and fluency. The role of morphosyntactic abilities on reading is, however, not clear. This study explores the influence of morphosyntactic competence on reading in Italian children with and without DD. A total of 14 children with DD and 28 with Typical Development (TD) attending the Italian primary school were tested on written decoding, syntactic comprehension of different grammatical structures, and syntactic production of direct object clitic pronouns. DD children were significantly less accurate and slower in reading than TD children. Syntactic skills of the two groups did not differ significantly, but some differences in their acquisitional pace emerged. Syntactic comprehension and production of direct-object-clitic pronouns predicted reading accuracy standard scores, thus suggesting that morphosyntactic abilities, beyond clitics' weak phonological status, affect decoding accuracy. Decoding accuracy was influenced by reading errors related to morphology (morphological, semantic, and phonological-output-buffer errors). Decoding speed was a specific weakness of DD children and was rather affected by multi-letter combinations. Consistent with a dual-route approach to orthographic processing, we argue that accuracy depends on fine-grained decoding strategies maximizing the precise ordering of letters, thus it is more sensitive to morphosyntactic skills. Morphological reading errors were associated with phonologically weak (determiners, clitic pronouns, and prepositions) and salient words (verbs). This suggests that the decoding of function words and morphologically complex words is particularly demanding and related to both phonological and morphosyntactic skills. Age had a negative predictive effect on semantic errors, compatible with the gradual acquisition of lexical decoding strategies, which seemed to be slowed down by DD. We conclude that oral morphosyntactic skills play a role in reading accuracy in the Italian shallow orthography for both DD and TD children. It is then advisable to assess children's linguistic profile during DD diagnoses to establish whether some reading errors are related to morphosyntactic weakness. In this case, ad hoc morphosyntactic training might support reading accuracy.
RESUMO
OBJECTIVES: The auditory speech sounds evaluation 2009 test battery for assessment of speech pitch perception is presented. It was designed to (a) assess perception of pitch in linguistic contexts without the confounds of secondary acoustic cues, (b) be usable with listeners from different language backgrounds, and (c) be suitable for use in a clinical setting. The need for this test battery arises from increased awareness of the importance of prosody in clinical practice, and the development of methods for improving pitch perception in listeners with profound hearing losses. METHODS: Identification and discrimination tasks based on linguistic contexts were developed to establish listeners' just noticeable differences (JNDs) for pitch changes. Stimuli were pseudosentences and pseudowords based on speech from a female speaker, overlain with stylized pitch contours. Target pitch excursions were varied from the 200 Hz baseline to a maximum of 349 Hz. Ninety normal-hearing listeners participated in test validation that assessed goals (a)-(c), established test-retest reliability, and gathered normative data. RESULTS: The JNDs on non-linguistic, control tasks were lower than on linguistic ones, showing that non-linguistic tasks may overestimate pitch perception in speech. Listeners from different language backgrounds scored comparably on most linguistic tasks, and test-retest differences were non-significant. Test usability as evidenced by task duration and subject experience seemed satisfactory for clinical use.
