Dichotic Listening in Good and Poor Readers

Abstract

Dichotic listening performance using CV pairs was investigated in a group of 30 children, 15 good readers and 15 poor readers, aged 10–13 years. The results indicate that the poor readers did not demonstrate atypical laterality or phonetic processing effects, although there was significant difference in their ability to identify both items on dichotic trials correctly. However, when the same stimuli were presented monotically, there was no difference in the performance of the groups. Additional testing indicated that the poor performance for the double-correct response class was also demonstrated in conditions where the dichotic stimuli were separated by as much as 500 and 1000 msec. These results support previous findings that reading-disabled children exhibit a deficit in their capacity to process two items on dichotic tasks. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of both neurological and auditory processing interpretations, and it is suggested that dichotic tasks are useful for investigating auditory processing problems in reading-disabled children.