Dr Studdert-Kennedy and his allies reckon that although Fast ForWord does appear to improve language competence, it may not be for the reasons that Dr Tallal and Dr Merzenich have claimed.

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Dr Studdert-Kennedy maintains that speech moves in a fluid stream of sound that has little resemblance to the discrete tones used in Dr Merzenich's hearing tests, and that dyslexia probably stems from a high-level problem in the brain's language system that is simply not yet understood.

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Michael Studdert-Kennedy, a psychologist at the Haskins Laboratory, in New Haven, Connecticut, and one of the most vigorous critics of the approach, argues that other studies have shown that the brain processes speech sounds completely differently from non-speech sounds, and that the hearing problem identified by Dr Merzenich's group thus has nothing to do with dyslexia.

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