Muñetón, M. 1 , Vásquez, C. 1 , Estevéz, A. 2 & Ortíz, R. 2
1 University of Antioquia
2 University of La Laguna
The purpose of this study is to asses if the temporal processing in visual and auditory modality is affected by the kind of stimuli (linguistic and non-linguistic) in children at risk for reading disabilities. In order to address the issue was necessary to control for the complexity of the stimuli across the temporal and acoustical dimension, and to administer tasks that adopt identical paradigms in both modalities. In this study participated 36 children (age, M= 67.86; SD= 3.53) at risk for reading disabilities (RD) and 36 (age, M= 67.38; SD= 3.91) without risk for reading disabilities (NRD) from kindergarten (i.e., just before the initiation of formal reading instruction) were tested on visual and auditory TOJ tasks taking into account linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. The analysis of Group (RD x NRD) by auditory stimuli (linguistics - nonlinguistic) showed a significant interaction. Results indicated RD group? accuracy was lower than NRD group both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. Also, RD group? accuracy was lower in linguistic stimuli than non-linguistic stimuli while in NRD group? accuracy there was not difference. The analysis of Group (RD x NRD) by visual stimuli (linguistics - nonlinguistic) showed that the performance of NRD group was higher than RD group. The discussion highlights how investigating different stimuli can deepen our understanding of the role temporal processing plays in early reading difficulties.