Time estimation in developmental dyslexia: An experimental investigation

Time estimation is the ability to judge the duration or apprehend the passage of time by the order of occurrence of experience or by physiological rhythm (Fraisse, 1984). It plays quite a significant role in language disorder especially developmental dyslexia. It is characterized by deficits in phonological processing abilities. However, it is unclear what the underlying factors for poor phonological abilities or speech sound representations are. The deficit in phonological processes has been for the processing of paired tones or temporal sequences different when relatively short time intervals are used in individuals with dyslexia compared to typical readers. This paper pre- sents the results of a study that was undertaken to determine the effects of method of time judgment, and paradigm on dyslexic and atypical readers. An experiment was conducted using 115 children (age: M = 12.23 years, SD = 1.30), 51 dyslexics and 64 typical readers. The data were obtained through the method of verbal estimation and reproduction. Analysis of variance was used to analyse the data. Time judgments data were analyzed using directional error. For directional error, all the main effects and few interactions were significant. Children with dyslexia showed more errors in time estimation (M = 0.59, SD = 0.52) as compared to typical readers (M = 0.83, SD = 0.74). Estimation of duration under the prospective paradigm was more accurate than under the retrospective paradigm for both dyslexics and typical readers. However, dyslexics were more error prone as compared to typical readers. Time judgment was accurate under verbal time estimation as compared to reproduction method.