Somos um grupo de cientistas a tentar compreender qual é a relação entre perceção de tempo e dificuldades de leitura (dislexia). Para isto, estamos a realizar alguns estudos com técnicas de EEG e eye-tracking. Esperamos que as nossas descobertas possam ajudar professores e outros profissionais do desenvolvimento. Para ter uma ideia do nosso projeto, espreite o vídeo.

 

investigação em

dislexia

e perceção de
trancrição video

Video 1 - transcrição

Reading requires various mental skills. To our surprise, researchers found recently that being able to perceive time accurately may be also important to read well.
How is this possible, since – unlike speech – text is static and timeless?


Let’s start by looking at what it means to “perceive time”.
In daily life, we constantly feel time passing. We can judge whether little or much time has passed, and even provide time estimations in seconds, minutes or hours. For instance, while watching an athlete running the 100 meters, we can guess how long he took to do it.
Nevertheless, our guess will be just an estimation, and we need to use a watch to be sure. Let’s name this type of time “daily-life time”.
…and you ask: is there another type of time? Yes, there is! We will call it musical time.
Musical time is based on regular beats that we create, with no need for a watch. Each beat can last 1 second, half second, whatever. We don’t need to know. We just need to keep beats regular. For example, gym instructors oTen count to 4 or 8 while demonstrating exercises. They choose the beat, and they keep it regular.
…What is the point of using this type of time?...
The point is that a regular beat allows us to anticipate when something is going to happen. If we know, for instance, that we have to move down on beat number 3, we will do it with precision. This is how we can get people synchronized.
“On 3, please go down: 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4.”
Can you see the difference? In daily life, each of us tends to follow his or her own time. If we lived constantly under musical time, everything would be much more organized! (That is what the army does, by the way…)


…what about reading? What’s time got to do with it?
Time has a lot to do with reading. Let’s start with musical time.


To learn how to read, we must be able to match letters with speech sounds. Even when reading in silence, we imagine speech sounds.
In order to perceive and learn speech sounds, brain waves must synchronize with the rhythm of the sounds we hear.
When we synchronize our brain waves with the rhythm of speech sounds, we can follow them with attention, and anticipate when the next sound will appear.

This brain synchronization with speech sounds is based on regular cycles and, thus, it is quite similar to what our brain does when we perceive musical time.
This is why an important current theory of reading claims that our reading skills depend on our ability to perceive musical time.
This is a very interesting theory and it has shown results, but a lot of questions remain unanswered: for instance, how can this work, given that speech rhythm is not per-fec-tly re-gu- lar? This will be our first research question.


…and how about daily-life time? Is it also important?
It can be – again, because of speech sounds, but in a different way.
First, some sounds are very similar, and they differ only in duration. The sounds p and b, for instance, involve different durations of sound vs. silence.
If we cannot distinguish the durations of different sounds, we will not master speech and, consequently, we may have problems when reading.
Other facets of speech also require sensitivity to duration. For instance, when a phrase ends, speech sounds become gradually slower. If we cannot hear that a phrase is ending (because we did not spot the lengthening of sounds), we may also have difficulties matching speech with text.
So, both musical time and daily-life time may be important for learning how to read.
This is our second question – whether people with increased capabilities for distinguishing durations in speech also have better reading skills.


We have two other puzzles to solve.
One of these concerns the relation between daily-life time and musical time.
Some studies show that we use musical time to perceive daily-life time, that is, sometimes we can imagine a beat to guess how much time has passed, especially when we are dealing with long time intervals.
Could it be true that people with problems in learning how to read (they are said to have dyslexia) have problems in using musical time to judge daily-life time?
Is musical time the most important type of time when It comes to reading?


Our last puzzle is the following:
People with reading problems seem to have difficulties not only in estimating time from auditory events, like speech, but also from visual events – for instance, knowing how long it took for an athlete to complete the run.
The thing is many visual events that convey time also convey movement (the athlete moves), and thus we have a conundrum: is it about time, or about movement?

Stay tuned! We will keep you updated!

 

 
Time2Read, 3/2021 – 9/2023: E agora, o fim?

De forma alguma. Apesar do fim oficial, temos ainda muitas descobertas à espera de serem avaliadas, discutidas e publicadas.  Também estamos a trabalhar em conselhos e recomendações para a intervenção. Fique atento!

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