Project management: PD Dr. Claudia Steinbrink, Prof. Dr. Christian Fiebach (Goethe University Frankfurt), Prof. Dr. Thomas Lachmann

Funding: State Offensive for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence (LOEWE) of the Hessian state government; project at the Center for Research on Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk (IdeA) of the German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF) and the University of Frankfurt

Funding volume: 150,000 €

Duration: July 2011 to June 2014

Content:

Phonological processing deficits are undisputedly a core symptom of developmental disorders in the area of reading and writing. However, the question of whether they actually reflect the primary cause or whether they are not a consequence of a non-linguistic auditory processing deficit is controversial. To investigate this, we use a newly developed paradigm (Groth, Lachmann, Riecker, Muthmann & Steinbrink., 2011) which allows the direct comparison of phonological, i.e. linguistic, and non-linguistic, i.e. temporal and spectral, aspects of processing in the discrimination of vowel length. In the planned study, a longitudinal EEG mismatch negativity experiment will be used to investigate whether children with dyslexia and control children differ with regard to the preconscious processing of phonological and non-linguistic aspects of vowel length