EP Language & Development Seminar: Audiovisual processing and reading: An exploration into the extent and nature of their association

Learning to read is essentially an audiovisual mapping problem: Beginning readers need to learn and retain how visual graphemes and auditory phonemes map onto each other. Reading difficulties could thus at least partially reflect an underlying problem with learning, retaining, and accessing audiovisual associations. The extent and nature of the relationship between audiovisual processing and reading is, however, still largely unknown. One possibility is that dyslexic readers have a general deficit in processing and combining audiovisual information and investigating audiovisual speech perception in people with and without dyslexia provides an opportunity to investigate audiovisual processing in an ecologically valid context (that of audiovisual speech perception), without probing the direct area of difficulty (reading). In this talk I will review first results of our studies in children and adults with dyslexia, as well as some preliminary results in typically developing children.