An investigation into the link between auditory perceptual skills, specifically the perception of rhythm patterns, and reading (dis)abilities

The skill of Reading may be recognised as being at the top of the hierachy of language based skills. As such, it is subserved by a number of contributory abilities of which one of the most important is auditory perception. Auditory perceptual ability is distinguished from auditory acuity in that the former is the process by which auditory stimuli are received and understood. Auditory acuity alone is merely the recognition of an auditory stimulus having occurred i.e., the threshold of hearing. The assessment of auditory perceptual abilities (including auditory discrimination, auditory memory, auditory blending, auditory-visual integration, and auditory comprehension) during early childhood may be recognised as a valuable predictor of subsequent reading achievement. Children who suffer some degree of reading disability have been found to perform less well on such auditory tasks when their performance is compared to that of their non reading disabled peers. This inferior performance has been noted as having occurred both during the period of early reading education, and at the pre-reading level. The current study, however, failed to find a significant difference between a group of 9 - 11 year old reading disabled children and a similarly aged group of non reading disabled children, on the Seashore Rhythm Test. This test requires the perception of auditorily presented rhythm pairs and subsequent identification of the presented pairs as being either the "same" or "different". A difference within the suggestive range of significance was found, however, between the performances of the males and those of the females with the females performing the task better than the males. In particular, this finding regarding the differences between the perceptual abilities of the sexes provides some support for the issue that the majority of children who experience reading disabilities are male. Some reasons as to why a non significant difference was found between the reading ability groups and a difference suggestive of significance was found between the sexes, in this study, are postulated