Prosodic processing in developmental dyslexia: A case study in Standard Chinese

The present case study investigated the speech production and perception of developmental dyslexia through prosodic cues in Standard Chinese. As a non-alphabetic tonal language, there is a complex neurobiological mechanism between visual picture processing and semantic priming, perception and production of prosodic patterns. The experimental materials employed in the study were the syntactic structure of Double Object construction with various information structures. The results show that the dyslexic participant, a native Chinese adult, i.e. M6, had an impaired perceptual ability to discriminate boundaries and sentence accents in different information structures. While on the aspect of production, both sentence accents and boundaries produced by M6 could be perceived by other normal participants, however, every syntactic structure has a consistent pattern in all the focus conditions. The results implied that in normal participants, prosody processing (i.e., sentence accent and boundary perception) was interacted with higher-level information of language, such as syntactic and information structures, however, the dyslexic shows no such interactions.