Reduced audiovisual temporal sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia

Background: Temporal processing deficits regarding audiovisual cross-modal stimuli could affect children’s speed and accuracy of decoding. Aim: To investigate the characteristics of audiovisual temporal sensitivity (ATS) in Chinese children, with and without developmental dyslexia and its impact on reading ability. Methods: The audiovisual simultaneity judgment and temporal order judgment tasks were performed to investigate the ATS of 106 Chinese children (53 with dyslexia) aged 8 to 12 and 37 adults without a history of dyslexia. The predictive effect of children’s audiovisual time binding window on their reading ability and the effects of extra cognitive processing in the temporal order judgment task on participants’ ATS were also investigated. Outcomes and results: With increasing inter-stimulus intervals, the percentage of synchronous responses in adults declined more rapidly than in children. Adults and typically developing children had significantly narrower time binding windows than children with dyslexia. The size of visual stimuli preceding auditory stimuli time binding window had a marginally significant predictive effect on children’s reading fluency. Compared with the simultaneity judgment task, the extra cognitive processing of the temporal order judgment task affected children’s ATS. Conclusion and implications: The ATS of 8–12-year-old Chinese children is immature. Chinese children with dyslexia have lower ATS than their peers.