Recognizing voices depends on language ability
Study finds that for people with dyslexia, it’s much harder to identify who is speaking.
Distinguishing between other people’s voices may seem like a trivial task. However, if those people are speaking a language you don’t understand, it becomes much harder. That’s because you rely on individuals’ differences in pronunciation to help identify them. If you don’t understand the words they are saying, you don’t pick up on those differences.
That ability to process the relationship between sounds and their meanings, also known as phonology, is believed to be impaired in people with dyslexia. Therefore, neuroscientists at MIT theorized that people with dyslexia would find it much more difficult to identify speakers of their native language than non-dyslexic people.
In a study appearing in Science on July 29, the researchers found just that. People with dyslexia had a much harder time recognizing voices than non-dyslexics. In fact, they fared just as poorly as they (and non-dyslexics) did when listening to speakers of a foreign language.