ESTEVEZ, A. 1 , Muñetón, M. 2 & Ortíz, R. 1
1 University of La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain)
2 University of Antioquia (Medellin,Colombia)
Reading difficulties can be prevented trough early intervention in many children. To that end, we investigated the role of perceptual processing as a core deficit in developmental language disorders as dyslexia or specific language impairment (SLI). Our goal in this study is to examine the temporal processing hypothesis in children at risk for dyslexia or SLI. We assume that a general temporal processing deficit is not restricted to the auditory modality and should be apparent in other sensory modalities. Thus, the present study extends the investigation to visual temporal processing. We compared the perceptive processing skills of 16 children at risk for developing dyslexia or SLI and 16 controls, all of them attending preschool level. Children were tested on two perceptual tasks, visual and auditory tasks of temporal order judgment (TOJ) where children indicated which signal appeared firstly. In addition, children performed a same-different discrimination task (S-D). The results showed that the performance in determining the order of stimuli was lower in children at risk for dyslexia or SLI in both TOJ tasks modalities. The present study suggests that the difficulty to process the temporal order in rapid succession of acoustic and visual items, could explain why some children fail to develop appropriate skills for learning to read and this difficulty could operate as an early predictor in SLI or dyslexia.