Speech perception problems in Chinese children with reading difficulties: Insights from acoustic context effects

OBJECTIVES: The perception of speech sounds is influenced by adjacent acoustic contexts. The present study examined whether Chinese children with reading difficulties could effectively utilize both the preceding (forward) and subsequent (backward) acoustic contexts when identifying stop consonant continua. METHODS: A group of Chinese children with poor reading abilities (n = 34) and an age-matched group of typical readers (n = 34) completed two forward context effect tasks (nonspeech and speech context conditions) and one backward context effect task. The forward context tasks used nonspeech tones and vowel sounds as contexts, with a /da/-/ga/ continuum as the target stimuli. The backward context task employed vowels /a/ and /ε/ as contexts, with the /b/-/d/ continuum as the target stimuli. The supplementary measures included assessments of phoneme awareness and academic performance. RESULTS: Poor readers demonstrated typical forward context effects for both nonspeech and speech context conditions, yet exhibited significantly reduced backward context effects compared to typical readers. The slopes of their identification curves were also significantly lower than those of the typical readers. No significant correlation emerged between phoneme awareness and measures of context effects. Notably, poor readers with stronger mathematical abilities showed both the shallowest identification curve slopes and smallest backward context effects. CONCLUSION: Chinese children with reading difficulties perform well when acoustic context effects are grounded in general auditory processing mechanisms (forward context effects). However, when these effects are mediated through phonological processing (backward context effects), poor readers exhibit significantly poorer performance than typical readers.