Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies suggest that multisensory linkages betweenspeech and vision are implicated in the development ofdyslexia. Current data only address a relationship in adultswith existing diagnoses, but do not inform us about thedevelopmental trajectory of the association. We conducted apre-registered study of multisensory matching in 388 pre-readers in Singapore (Age: 5y 10m) using an adaptation of thebouba-kiki task (the Alien Zoo), and compared children’sperformance on this task to their earlier scores on measuresknown to predict dyslexia: phonological awareness,vocabulary size and letter knowledge. As reported elsewhere,children’s Alien Zoo scores were lower than adults’(Woon &Styles, 2017a). The language measures were strongly inter-correlated, suggesting persistent language skills acrossmultiple domains, However we found no significantrelationship between performance on the Alien Zoo task andany of the predictors of dyslexia. This may mean that therelationship is yet to emerge in this population. The childrenin this cohort will be tracked and tested at a later time point toestablish the developmental trajectory of this relationship.