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A New and Interesting study, which will go online today in the journal Science, shows that people with dyslexia have a harder time distinguishing between the voices of individual speakers and the nuances of their phonetic speech patterns than do non-dyslexic peers.

The study, from MIT, theorized that the language processing parts of dyslexia might interfere with recognizing the individual phonetic patterns that make one individual voice slightly different from another’s voice, even when speaking the same words and in the same language.

Difficulties with phonology interfere with reading and spelling. This is another study that bolsters the prevailing theory that dyslexia, an unexpected difficulty with reading, is other than a visual processing difficulty.

Seeing dyslexia primarily as a visual processing disorder (seeing “was” for “saw”) was the prevailing explanation in the 80′s). While it’s clear that dyslexia isn’t just one thing with one explanation, most experts agree that a central component of dyslexia is phonological processing, which involves the perception and play of discrete sounds and aspects of sounds within words (syllables, vowel patterns and sequencing). This is why dyslexia leads to spelling problems and not just reading.

The findings help to shed some additional light on how to engage a dyslexic learner during verbal instruction. Reducing background noise/competing voices, adding visual and graphic cues are two obvious applications of the findings.

Articles on this study can be found here, at the MIT NEWS and here, at US NEWS and WORLD REPORT