Dichotic Listening CV Lateralization and Developmental Dyslexia

Abstract

The present study was carried out on a sample of 125 right-handed boys who are described as follows: 50 boys with dyslexia, 50 controls of a similar age, and 25 controls according to reading level. Using an objective procedure based on regression, we selected three subgroups from among the poor readers: children with difficulties in the lexical pathway (surface dyslexics), children with difficulties in the sublexical pathway (phonological dyslexics), and children with problems in both pathways (mixed dyslexics). When the performances of these children on a dichotic listening task with CV syllables as stimuli were compared, it was found that although the children with dyslexia obtained lower lateralization indices than did the controls, the differences were only clearly significant when the most severe cases of phonological dyslexia were selected.