People with dyslexia have a hard time recognizing voices, researchers say

Washington • Pick up the phone and hear, “Hey, what’s up?” Chances are, those few words are enough to recognize who’s speaking — perhaps unless you have dyslexia.

In a surprise discovery, researchers found adults with that reading disorder also have a hard time recognizing voices.

The work isn’t just a curiosity. It fits with research to uncover the building blocks of literacy and how they can go wrong. The eventual goal: To spot at-risk youngsters even before they open “Go, Dog, Go!” in kindergarten — instead of diagnosing dyslexia in a struggling second-grader.

“Everybody is interested in understanding the root cause of dyslexia, so we can intervene early and do something about it,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive neuroscientist John Gabrieli, senior author of the study published last week in the journal Science. 

Dyslexia is thought to affect 8 to 15 percent of Americans, who can have great difficulty reading and writing. It’s not a problem with intelligence or vision. Instead, it’s language-based. The brain struggles with what’s called “phonological processing” — being able to distinguish and manipulate sounds, like “bah” and “pah,” that eventually have to be linked to written letters and words.

A graduate student in Gabrieli’s lab wondered if dyslexia would impair voice recognition as well. After all, subtle differences in pronunciation help distinguish people.

How to test that? Previous studies have shown it’s easier to recognize voices if they’re speaking your own language. So the researchers recruited English-speaking college students and young adults, half with dyslexia, half without. They watched animated characters — like a clown, a mechanic, a soccer player — speaking either English or Chinese, to get familiar with how they sounded.

Then came the test, to match a voice to its character. The volunteers correctly identified the Chinese speakers only about half the time, regardless of whether they had dyslexia. But when they heard English speakers, people with dyslexia still were right only half the time — while the non-dyslexics did far better, identifying 70 percent of the voices correctly.

That provides further evidence of dyslexia’s strong link to phonological impairment.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s a cleverly designed project that begs the question of whether voice recognition is a problem in young children, too, says Florida State University psychology professor Richard Wagner, who studies how to identify dyslexia early.

Gabrieli says he plans to test 5-year-olds.

Today, researchers know that children who are more phonologically aware when they enter kindergarten have a better shot at easy reading. One way to check that: See how they’re able to delete sounds from words — ask them to quickly say “cowboy” without the “boy.” Wagner says a child who answers such tasks correctly probably is developing fine. One who fails doesn’t necessarily have problems but merely could have misunderstood or not wanted to play along. He says more clear-cut methods are needed.

Differences in brain-processing show up even in infants, says Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who studies how babies learn language.

A colleague in her lab tested how well babies could distinguish “ah” and “ee” sounds between ages 7 months and 11 months of age. Those who did best wound up with bigger vocabularies and better pre-reading skills, such as rhyming, by their fifth birthdays. That doesn’t mean they’ll go on to experience dyslexia, but it does show how very early development can play a role in reading-readiness.

But Kuhl says the voice-recognition study has broader implications for brain science. It shows that for split-second recognition, the brain’s social-oriented right side works together with the speech-perception region of the left brain. People with dyslexia apparently are missing out on some of that interaction.

That interaction, too, begins to appear early. At age 7 months, babies listening to recordings of their native language can recognize if there’s a change in speakers, but they miss that speaker change if they’re listening to a foreign language, she says. Scientists now have to figure out that neural wiring to learn how it goes awry.

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Personal Note:  I've been plagued by this problem all my life. I've always had a hard time understanding simple things. In school I could not understand what the teacher was saying much of the time, it didn't make sense to me. My parents purchased these phonics records to see if it would improve my ability to discern words. Sorry to say it didn't help. I can't always make out the lyrics of songs.

For example: When UPS introduced their "It's Logistics" campaign with a song as the whole audio, I couldn't understand what they were singing and how it related to UPS. I had to sit down in front of the TV and listen very carefully, concentrating very hard on the song. Then as the graphic tag at the end come up "Logistics" then, and only then could I recognize that word in the song and then it started to make sense to me.

It also creates problems with speech in as much as you learn words improperly because you don't hear them the same as everyone else. so when you talk you mispronounce words or your brain will replace the word with a similar sounding word. It it horrifying when you are talking to an educated person that knows you are talking poorly. Your mind knows that you spoke the word wrong and even when you try to say the correct word, your mouth will not cooperate, it will say something completely different.

Reading was very difficult and still is. I struggle everyday. When I was in second grade, the teacher had me evaluated by a specialist to see if I was "Retarded" and should I be institutionalized in the state hospital for the mentally retarded, as they called it back then. But the specialist said that I was not retarded and had a higher IQ than normal. So I was not shipped off to American Fork Mentally Handicapped Hospital to live my life out.

One of the careers school councilors would say I should go into was radio or television because my voice has the ideal sound for such use. But I was scared to death to even think about it, because I knew I would screw up words, have a hard time reading the text on air and that would just be too much. I shrunk away from seeking such a career. Yes, I  would have loved to be a TV news anchor, reporter, or DJ. But since I couldn't read well, hear things clearly, or speak correctly all the time, that was out of the question.

Even learning sentence structure didn't make sense to me, because my brain would screw it up as the teacher was trying to teach us. I struggled and struggled all through school. I wanted to learn, but it became increasingly frustrating trying to keep up and pass the tests. It literally wore me out emotionally. By the end of school, I was drained. Even today, I will come home and just be so tired from dealing with this inflection that all I want to do is sleep for awhile to recover some energy. I don't, I keep on going and then maybe crash on the couch much later while Judy is still working on her charts.

Dyslexia is a horrible inflection from birth and throughout your life. I would hope that researchers can find a way to correct this problem early so those of us who want to excel can do so without the huge struggle everyday.