Contribution of auditory tasks to dyslexia screening

Dyslexia is a specific disorder of language. Research on the origin of dyslexia has led to multiple hypotheses and various rehabilitation treatments. This paper evaluates the ability of different auditory tasks to screen dyslexia. Three tasks are tested: a temporal modulation transfer function task where the detection thresholds of sinusoidal amplitude modulation applied to a noise carrier are measured and identification and discrimination tasks of two natural syllables /ba/-/pa/ to evaluate the categorical perception skills in children with developmental dyslexia. The results obtained in dyslexics and normal readers are compared. Statistical analyses (Mann-Whitney test and logistic regression model) are performed in order to evaluate the contribution of these tasks to dyslexia detection. This study includes 35 dyslexic children and 78 normal readers.