0000000000364776

AUTHOR

Riikka Lovio

Could audiovisual training be used to improve cognition in extremely low birth weight children?

Aim: To study whether a dyslexia remediation programme, Audilex, improves cognition in extremely low birth (ELBW) children. Methods: Six-year-old ELBW children were allocated to a 5-week training with Audilex or playing control computer games. Before and after intervention, auditory event-related brain potentials (ERP) to sound changes were recorded and reading related skills assessed. Primary outcome was the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of ERP. Secondary outcomes were Audilex Test (ability to perform the Audilex games), the reading skills after the intervention and 2 years later. Of eligible children, 39 (54%) consented and 22 (30%) completed the protocol. Results: The MMN responses…

research product

Reading skill and neural processing accuracy improvement after a 3-hour intervention in preschoolers with difficulties in reading-related skills

This study aimed at determining whether an intervention game developed for strengthening phonological awareness has a remediating effect on reading skills and central auditory processing in 6-year-old preschool children with difficulties in reading-related skills. After a 3-hour training only, these children made a greater progress in reading-related skills than did their matched controls who did mathematical exercises following comparable training format. Furthermore, the results suggest that this brief intervention might be beneficial in modulating the neural basis of phonetic discrimination as an enhanced speech-elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) was seen in the intervention group, indic…

research product

Auditory discrimination profiles of speech sound changes in 6-year-old children as determined with the multi-feature MMN paradigm.

Objective: A linguistic multi-feature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm with five types of changes (vowel, vowel-duration, consonant, frequency (F0), and intensity) in Finnish syllables was used to determine speech-sound discrimination in 17 normally-developing 6-year-old children. The MMNs for vowel and vowel-duration were also recorded in an oddball condition in order to compare the two paradigms. Similar MMNs in the two paradigms would suggest that they tap the same processes. This would promote the usefulness of the more time-efficient multi-feature paradigm for future studies in children. Methods: MMNs to five deviant types were recorded in the multi-feature paradigm in which these de…

research product