Listening Devices Improve Reading Skills of Dyslexia Children

Dyslexia or developmental reading disorder is a learning disability that affects a person's ability to read, write and spell words and sentences.

The brain-based learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in reading, affects nearly five percent of the school-age children in the country.

Children with dyslexia often experience trouble with phonemic awareness and phonics. Now, bringing new hopes researchers have uncovered the role of listening devices like FM systems in helping these kids to improve their phonological awareness and reading skills.

For analyzing the link, Nina Kraus and colleagues included 38 children. All the participants aged between eight and 14 attended a school for children with reading problems. The participants were divided into two groups- one with an assistive listening device and another without.

"With the FM approach, the teacher wears a microphone and the student wears a behind-the-ear FM receiver, which effectively pipes the teacher's voice into the ear, which allows a child to be more focused," Kraus, Principal Investigator of The Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University and the study's co-author, said in a news release.

Participants used the listening devices throughout each school day, the whole academic year. At the end of the study, students who used the devices showed remarkable improvement.

"When we measured the brain's response to speech sounds, the kids who wore the device responded more consistently to the very soft and rapidly changing elements of sounds that help distinguish one consonant from another (cat, bat, pat etc.). That improved stability was linked with reading improvement based on standardized measures of readability - which, as a long-term benefit, points to brain plasticity and makes this study incredibly exciting," Kraus explained. "Improving a child's auditory processing of sound in this way gives children a better chance to make associations between what they hear and what these sounds mean. Then they can connect that information to what they see on paper."

Results of the study have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Efforts to help children affected with dyslexia have been going on from a long time. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found leaving wider space between letters helping dyslexic children read faster with fewer mistakes.