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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- In a classroom filled with clicking pens and tapping toes, children with dyslexia may find it difficult to tune out distracting noises.
According to a new study from Northwestern University, children who are good readers have no trouble focusing on their teachers and are able to learn from repeating auditory signals. However, researchers say they found biological evidence that kids who have developmental dyslexia -- a neurological disorder affecting reading and spelling skills in 5 to 10 percent of school aged children -- have difficulties separating relevant auditory information from competing noise.
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The ability to sharpen or fine-tune repeating elements is crucial to hearing speech in noise because it allows for superior tagging of voice pitch, an important cue in picking out a particular voice within background noise, Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles, Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology at Northwestern University, was quoted as saying.
Researchers asked children with varied reading skills to watch a video, while a speech recording of the sound da played repeatedly in the background. They measured childrens brain responses to the sounds, and asked the kids to repeat certain sentences presented to them during background sounds.
Even though the childrens attention was focused on the movie, the auditory system of the good readers tuned in to the repeatedly presented speech sound context and sharpened with the sounds encoding, Bharath Chandrasekaran, lead author of the study, was quoted as saying. In contrast, poor readers did not show an improvement in encoding with repetition.
SOURCE: Neuron, November 12, 2009
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