0000000000157200
AUTHOR
Tomi K. Guttorm
Maturational effects on newborn ERPs measured in the mismatch negativity paradigm.
Abstract The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related potentials (ERPs), a measure of passive change detection, is suggested to develop early in comparison to other ERP components, and an MMN-like response has been measured even from preterm infants. The MMN response in adults is negative in polarity at about 150–200 ms. However, the response measured in a typical MMN paradigm can also be markedly different in newborns, even opposite in polarity. This has been suggested to be related to maturational factors. To verify that suggestion, we measured ERPs of 21 newborns during quiet sleep to rarely occurring deviant tones of 1100 Hz (probability 12%) embedded among repeated standard…
Brain event-related potentials (ERPs) measured at birth predict later language development in children with and without familial risk for dyslexia.
We report associations between brain event-related potentials (ERPs) measured from newborns with and without familial risk for dyslexia and these same children's later language and verbal memory skills at 2.5, 3.5, and 5 years of age. ERPs to synthetic consonant-vowel syllables (/ba/, /da/, /ga/; presented equiprobably with 3,910-7,285 msec interstimulus intervals) were recorded from 26 newborns at risk for familial dyslexia and 23 control infants participating in the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. The correlation and regression analyses showed that the at-risk type of response pattern at birth (a slower shift in polarity from positivity to negativity in responses to /ga/ at 540-…
N1 and P2 components of auditory event-related potentials in children with and without reading disabilities.
Abstract Objective The effects of within stimulus presentation rate and rise time on basic auditory processing were investigated in children with reading disabilities and typically reading children. Methods Children with reading disabilities (RD; N =19) and control children ( N =20) were studied using event-related potentials (ERPs). Paired stimuli were used with two different within-pair-intervals (WPI; 10 and 255ms) and two different rise times (10 and 130ms). Each stimulus was presented with equal probability and long between-pair inter-stimulus intervals (1–5s). The study focused on N1 and P2 components. Results The P2 responses to the first tone in the pair showed differences between c…
Brain sensitivity to print emerges when children learn letter–speech sound correspondences
The acquisition of reading skills is a major landmark process in a human's cognitive development. On the neural level, a new functional network develops during this time, as children typically learn to associate the well-known sounds of their spoken language with unfamiliar characters in alphabetic languages and finally access the meaning of written words, allowing for later reading. A critical component of the mature reading network located in the left occipito-temporal cortex, termed the “visual word-form system” (VWFS), exhibits print-sensitive activation in readers. When and how the sensitivity of the VWFS to print comes about remains an open question. In this study, we demonstrate the…
Event-related potentials to pitch and rise time change in children with reading disabilities and typically reading children.
Abstract Objective The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether children with reading disabilities (RD) process rise time and pitch changes differently to control children as a function of the interval between two tones. Methods Children participated in passive oddball event-related potential (ERP) measurements using paired stimuli. Mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a and late discriminative negativity (LDN) responses to rise time and pitch changes were examined. Results Control children produced larger responses than children with RD to pitch change in the P3a component but only when the sounds in the pair were close to each other. Compared to children with RD, MMN was smaller an…
Newborn brain event-related potentials revealing atypical processing of sound frequency and the subsequent association with later literacy skills in children with familial dyslexia
The role played by an auditory-processing deficit in dyslexia has been debated for several decades. In a longitudinal study using brain event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated 1) whether dyslexic children with familial risk background would show atypical pitch processing from birth and 2) how these newborn ERPs later relate to these same children's pre-reading cognitive skills and literacy outcomes. Auditory ERPs were measured at birth for tones varying in pitch and presented in an oddball paradigm (1100 Hz, 12%, and 1000 Hz, 88%). The brain responses of the typically reading control group children (TRC group, N=25) showed clear differentiation between the frequencies, while those o…
Auditory event-related potentials measured in kindergarten predict later reading problems at school age.
Identifying children at risk for reading problems or dyslexia at kindergarten age could improve support for beginning readers. Brain event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured for temporally complex pseudowords and corresponding non-speech stimuli from 6.5-year-old children who participated in behavioral literacy tests again at 9 years in the second grade. Children who had reading problems at school age had larger N250 responses to speech and non-speech stimuli particularly at the left hemisphere. The brain responses also correlated with reading skills. The results suggest that atypical auditory and speech processing are a neural-level risk factor for future reading problems. [Supplement…
Event-Related Potentials and Consonant Differentiation in Newborns with Familial Risk for Dyslexia
We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to synthetic consonant-vowel syllables (/ba/, /da/, /ga/) from 26 newborns with familial risk for dyslexia and 23 control infants participating in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. The syllables were presented with equal probability and with interstimulus intervals ranging from 3,010 to 7,285 ms. Analyses of averaged ERPs from the latencies identified on the basis of principal component analysis (PCA) revealed significant group differences in stop-consonant processing in several latency ranges. At the latencies of 50-170 ms and 540-630 ms, the responses to /ga/ were larger and more positive than those to /ba/ and /da/ in the right hem…
Brain responses to changes in speech sound durations differ between infants with and without familial risk for dyslexia
A specific learning disability, developmental dyslexia, is a language-based disorder that is shown to be strongly familial. Therefore, infants born to families with a history of the disorder are at an elevated risk for the disorder. However, little is known of the potential early markers of dyslexia. Here we report differences between 6-month-old infants with and without high risk of familial dyslexia in brain electrical activation generated by changes in the temporal structure of speech sounds, a critical cueing feature in speech. We measured event-related brain responses to consonant duration changes embedded in ata pseudowords applying an oddball paradigm, in which pseudoword tokens with…
Common variance in amplitude envelope perception tasks and their impact on phoneme duration perception and reading and spelling in Finnish children with reading disabilities
ABSTRACTOur goal was to investigate auditory and speech perception abilities of children with and without reading disability (RD) and associations between auditory, speech perception, reading, and spelling skills. Participants were 9-year-old, Finnish-speaking children with RD (N = 30) and typically reading children (N = 30). Results showed significant group differences between the groups in phoneme duration discrimination but not in perception of amplitude modulation and rise time. Correlations among rise time discrimination, phoneme duration, and spelling accuracy were found for children with RD. Those children with poor rise time discrimination were also poor in phoneme duration discrimi…
Event-related potentials in newborns with and without familial risk for dyslexia: principal component analysis reveals differences between the groups
Differences revealed by factor scores extracted by principal component analysis (PCA) from event-related potential (ERP) data of newborns with and without familial risk for dyslexia were examined and compared to results obtained by using original averaged ERPs. ERPs to consonant-vowel syllables (synthetic /ba/, /da/, /ga/; and natural /paa/, /taa/, /kaa/) were recorded from 26 at-risk and 23 control 1-7 day-old infants. The stimuli were presented equiprobably and with interstimulus intervals varying at random from 3,910 to 7,285 ms. Statistically significant between-group differences were found to be relatively similar irrespective of the methods of analysis (original ERPs vs. factor scores…
Developmental pathways of children with and without familial risk for dyslexia during the first years of life.
Comparisons of the developmental pathways of the first 5 years of life for children with (N = 107) and without (N = 93) familial risk for dyslexia observed in the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal study of Dyslexia are reviewed. The earliest differences between groups were found at the ages of a few days and at 6 months in brain event-related potential responses to speech sounds and in head-turn responses (at 6 months), conditioned to reflect categorical perception of speech stimuli. The development of vocalization and motor behavior, based on parental report of the time of reaching significant milestones, or the growth of vocabulary (using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories) failed t…
Early development of children at familial risk for Dyslexia—follow-up from birth to school age
We review the main findings of the Jyväskylä Longitudinal study of Dyslexia (JLD) which follows the development of children at familial risk for dyslexia (N = 107) and their controls (N = 93). We will illustrate the development of these two groups of children at ages from birth to school entry in the skill domains that have been connected to reading and reading disability in the prior literature. At school entry, the highest score on the decoding task among the poorer half (median) of the at risk children--i.e. of those presumably being most likely genetically affected--is 1 SD below the mean of the control group. Thus, the familial risk for dyslexia shows expected consequences. Among the e…
Cortical responses of infants with and without a genetic risk for dyslexia
We studied auditory event-related potentials (ERP) in newborns and 6-month-old infants, about half of whom had a familial risk for dyslexia. Syllables varying in vowel duration were presented in an oddball paradigm, in which ERPs to deviating stimuli are assumed to reflect automatic change detection in the brain. The ERPs of newborns had slow positive deflections typical of their age, but significant stimulus and group effects were found only by the age of 6 months. In both groups, the responses to the deviant /ka/ were more positive than those to the standard /kaa/ stimuli, contrary to the findings of adult ERPs to duration changes. The results also suggested differences in brain activatio…
Infant brain responses associated with reading-related skills before school and at school age
Summary Introduction In Jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia, we have investigated neurocognitive processes related to phonology and other risk factors of later reading problems. Here we review studies in which we have investigated whether dyslexic children with familial risk background would show atypical auditory/speech processing at birth, at six months and later before school and at school age as measured by brain event-related potentials (ERPs), and how infant ERPs are related to later pre-reading cognitive skills and literacy outcome. Patients and methods One half of the children came from families with at least one dyslexic parent (the at-risk group), while the other half belonge…
Newborn event-related potentials predict poorer pre-reading skills in children at risk for dyslexia.
Earlier results from the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia showed that newborn event-related potentials (ERPs) of children with and without familial risk for dyslexia were associated with receptive language and verbal memory skills between 2.5 and 5 years of age. We further examined whether these ERPs (responses to synthetic consonant-vowel syllables /ba/, /da/, /ga/; presented equiprobably with 3,910—7,285 ms interstimulus intervals) predict later pre-reading skills measured before the onset of school (6.5 years of age). In line with our earlier results, the at-risk children ( N = 11) with atypical speech processing in the right hemisphere (a slower shift in polarity from positivit…
Psychophysiology of developmental dyslexia: a review of findings including studies of children at risk for dyslexia
Abstract Brain imaging results illustrative of the search for neuronal markers of dyslexia are reviewed. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are shown to be effective indices of auditory processes involved in speech perception and thus, apparently also helpful in uncovering the neuronal basis of language problems associated with difficulties in reading. Results from the authors' laboratory show that, even at a very early age, brain responses (ERPs) to speech sounds can differentiate children with and without risk for dyslexia and also show reliable predictive correlations to later language development and reading acquisition. The review also covers dyslexia research in which other brain imaging…