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…

Modeling the early paths of phonological awareness and factors suopporting its development in children with and without familiar risk of dyslexia

The development of phonological awareness (PA) before school age was modeled in association with the development of vocabulary and letter knowledge, home literacy environment (HLE), children's reading interest, and beginning reading skill in children with and without familial risk of dyslexia. A total of 186 children were followed from birth to the age of 6.5 years. Of these children, about half had a familial background of reading difficulties (the at-risk group), and the other half came from families without such background (the control group). The data from several measures and assessment time points were analyzed within an SEM framework, and a latent analysis of growth curves was employ…

A dynamic adjustment model of saccade lengths in reading for word-spaced orthographies : evidence from simulations and invisible boundary experiments

Contemporary models of eye movement control in reading assume a discrete target word selection process preceding saccade length computation, while the selection itself is assumed to be driven by word identification processes. However, a potentially more parsimonious, dynamic adjustment view allows both next word length and its content (e.g. orthographic) to modulate saccade length in a continuous manner. Based on a recently proposed center-based saccade length account (a new regression model of forward saccade length is introduced and validated in a simulation study. Further, additional simulations and gaze-contingent invisible boundary experiments were used to study the cognitive mechanism…

Brain Source Correlates of Speech Perception and Reading Processes in Children With and Without Reading Difficulties

Neural correlates in reading and speech processing have been addressed extensively in the literature. While reading skills and speech perception have been shown to be associated with each other, their relationship remains debatable. In this study, we investigated reading skills, speech perception, reading, and their correlates with brain source activity in auditory and visual modalities. We used high-density event-related potentials (ERPs), fixation-related potentials (FRPs), and the source reconstruction method. The analysis was conducted on 12–13-year-old schoolchildren who had different reading levels. Brain ERP source indices were computed from frequently repeated Finnish speech stimuli…

Event‐related brain potentials to change in rapidly presented acoustic stimuli in newborns

Event-related brain potentials of 28 newborns to pitch change were studied during quiet sleep under stimulus conditions that typically elicit mismatch negativity in adults. Rarely occurring deviant tones of 1100 Hz (probability 12%) were embedded among repeated standard tones of 1000 Hz in an oddball-sequence with an interstimulus interval of 425 ms. Two control conditions were also employed: In the first, the 1100-Hz stimulus was presented alone without the intervening standard stimuli, and in the second the deviant stimulus had a pitch of 1300 Hz. In all conditions the infrequent stimulus elicited in most newborns a slow positive deflection peaking at a latency of 250-350 ms. The response…

An investigation of prototypical and atypical within-category vowels and non-speech analogues on cortical auditory evoked related potentials (AERPs) in 9 year old children

The present study examined cortical auditory evoked related potentials (AERPs) for the P1-N250 and MMN components in children 9 years of age. The first goal was to investigate whether AERPs respond differentially to vowels and complex tones, and the second goal was to explore how prototypical language formant structures might be reflected in these early auditory processing stages. Stimuli were two synthetic within-category vowels (/y/), one of which was preferred by adult German listeners ("prototypical-vowel"), and analogous complex tones. P1 strongly distinguished vowels from tones, revealing larger amplitudes for the more difficult to discriminate but phonetically richer vowel stimuli. P…

Infant information processing and family history of specific language impairment: converging evidence for RAP deficits from two paradigms

An infant's ability to process auditory signals presented in rapid succession (i.e. rapid auditory processing abilities [RAP]) has been shown to predict differences in language outcomes in toddlers and preschool children. Early deficits in RAP abilities may serve as a behavioral marker for language‐based learning disabilities. The purpose of this study is to determine if performance on infant information processing measures designed to tap RAP and global processing skills differ as a function of family history of specific language impairment (SLI) and/or the particular demand characteristics of the paradigm used. Seventeen 6‐ to 9‐month‐old infants from families with a history of specific l…

Mismatch negativity (MMN) as a tool for investigating auditory discrimination and sensory memory in infants and children

For decades behavioral methods, such as the head-turning or sucking paradigms, have been the primary methods to investigate auditory discrimination, learning and the function of sensory memory in infancy and early childhood. During recent years, however, a new method for investigating these issues in children has emerged. This method makes use of the mismatch negativity (MMN), the brain's automatic change-detection response, which has been used intensively in both basic and clinical studies in adults for twenty years. This review demonstrates that, unlike many other components of event-related potentials, the MMN is developmentally quite stable and can be obtained even from pre-term infants…

Dynamics of morphological processing in pre-school children with and without familial risk for dyslexia

Difficulties in phonological processing and speech perception are associated with developmental dyslexia, but there is considerable diversity across people with developmental dyslexia (e.g., dyslexics with and without phonological difficulties). Phonological and morphological awareness are both known to play an important role in reading acquisition. Problems in morpho-phonological information processing could arguably be associated with developmental dyslexia, especially for Finnish, which is a rich morphologically language. We used MEG to study the connection between morpho-phonology in the Finnish language and familial risk for developmental dyslexia. We measured event-related fields (ERF…

Perception of phonemic length and its relation to reading and spelling skills in children with family risk for dyslexia in the first three grades of school.

Purpose To examine the ability to discriminate phonemic length and the association of this ability with reading accuracy, reading speed, and spelling accuracy in Finnish children throughout Grades 1–3. Method Reading-disabled (RDFR, n = 35) and typically reading children (TRFR, n = 69) with family risk for dyslexia and typically reading control children (TRC, n = 80) were tested once in each grade of Grades 1–3 using a phonemic length discrimination task. Reading, spelling, IQ, verbal short-term memory, phonological memory, and naming speed were assessed. Results The RDFR group made more errors in phonemic length discrimination than the TRC group in Grades 2 and 3. After taking into accoun…

Neural Processing of Congruent and Incongruent Audiovisual Speech in School-Age Children and Adults

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-…

Validating rationale of group-level component analysis based on estimating number of sources in EEG through model order selection

This study addresses how to validate the rationale of group component analysis (CA) for blind source separation through estimating the number of sources in each individual EEG dataset via model order selection. Control children, typically reading children with risk for reading disability (RD), and children with RD participated in the experiment. Passive oddball paradigm was used for eliciting mismatch negativity during EEG data collection. Data were cleaned by two digital filters with pass bands of 1-30 Hz and 1-15 Hz and a wavelet filter with the pass band narrower than 1-12 Hz. Three model order selection methods were used to estimate the number of sources in each filtered EEG dataset. Un…

Brain event-related potentials to phoneme contrasts and their correlation to reading skills in school-age children

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the speech processing mechanisms for common and uncommon sound contrasts (/ba/-/da/-/ga/ and /ata/-/at: a/) with respect to the native language of school-age children in Finland and the US. In addition, a comprehensive behavioral test battery of reading and phonological processing was administered. ERPs revealed that the children could discriminate betw…

ERP correlates of the processing of speech sound prototipicality in Hungarian dyslexic and normal readers

Genome-wide association study reveals new insights into the heritability and genetic correlates of developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a learning disorder affecting the ability to read, with a heritability of 40–60%. A notable part of this heritability remains unexplained, and large genetic studies are warranted to identify new susceptibility genes and clarify the genetic bases of dyslexia. We carried out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on 2274 dyslexia cases and 6272 controls, testing associations at the single variant, gene, and pathway level, and estimating heritability using single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data. We also calculated polygenic scores (PGSs) based on large-scale GWAS data for different neuropsychiatric disorders and cortical brain measures, educational attainment,…

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…

Infant information processing and family history of specific language impairment: converging evidence for RAP deficits from two paradigms

An infant's ability to process auditory signals presented in rapid succession (i.e. rapid auditory processing abilities [RAP]) has been shown to predict differences in language outcomes in toddlers and preschool children. Early deficits in RAP abilities may serve as a behavioral marker for language-based learning disabilities. The purpose of this study is to determine if performance on infant information processing measures designed to tap RAP and global processing skills differ as a function of family history of specific language impairment (SLI) and/or the particular demand characteristics of the paradigm used. Seventeen 6- to 9-month-old infants from families with a history of specific l…

Understanding developmental language disorder-The Helsinki longitudinal SLI study (HelSLI): A study protocol

Background Developmental language disorder (DLD, also called specific language impairment, SLI) is a common developmental disorder comprising the largest disability group in pre-school-aged children. Approximately 7% of the population is expected to have developmental language difficulties. However, the specific etiological factors leading to DLD are not yet known and even the typical linguistic features appear to vary by language. We present here a project that investigates DLD at multiple levels of analysis and aims to make the reliable prediction and early identification of the difficulties possible. Following the multiple deficit model of developmental disorders, we investigate the DLD …

Dimension reduction: additional benefit of an optimal filter for independent component analysis to extract event-related potentials.

The present study addresses benefits of a linear optimal filter (OF) for independent component analysis (ICA) in extracting brain event-related potentials (ERPs). A filter such as the digital filter is usually considered as a denoising tool. Actually, in filtering ERP recordings by an OF, the ERP' topography should not be changed by the filter, and the output should also be able to be modeled by the linear transformation. Moreover, an OF designed for a specific ERP source or component may remove noise, as well as reduce the overlap of sources and even reject some non-targeted sources in the ERP recordings. The OF can thus accomplish both the denoising and dimension reduction (reducing the n…

Motivationaaliset ulottuvuudet tutkivassa nettilukemisessa

Tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin kuudesluokkalaisten nettilukemisen motivationaalisia ulottuvuuksia ja niiden yhteyttä tutkivan nettilukemisen tehtävässä menestymiseen. Tutkimukseen osallistui 426 kuudesluokkalaista oppilasta. Nettilukemisen motivationaalisia ulottuvuuksia mitattiin Yhdysvalloissa validoidulla mittarilla. Tutkivan nettilukemisen taitoja arvioitiin verkkopohjaisella tehtävällä, jossa oppilaat tutkivat energiajuomien terveysvaikutuksia. Tehtävä mittasi oppilaiden tiedonhakutaitoja, arviointitaitoja, taitoa laatia synteesi usean nettitekstin pohjalta sekä taitoja muodostaa ja kommunikoida perusteltu kanta tutkimastaan asiasta. Konfirmatorisessa faktorianalyysissä havaittiin neljä n…

Literacy Skill Development of Children With Familial Risk for Dyslexia Through Grades 2, 3, and 8

This study followed the development of reading speed, reading accuracy, and spelling in transparent Finnish orthography in children through Grades 2, 3, and 8. We compared 2 groups of children with familial risk for dyslexia—1 group with dyslexia (Dys_FR, n = 35) and 1 group without (NoDys_FR, n = 66) in Grade 2—with a group of children without familial risk for dyslexia (controls, n = 72). The Dys_FR group showed persistent deficiency, especially in reading speed, and, to a minor extent, in reading and spelling accuracy. The Dys_FR children, contrary to the other 2 groups, relied heavily on letter-by-letter decoding in Grades 2 and 3. In children not fulfilling the criteria for dyslexia in…

Responsivity to dyslexia training indexed by the N170 amplitude of the brain potential elicited by word reading.

The present study examined training effects in dyslexic children on reading fluency and the amplitude of N170, a negative brain-potential component elicited by letter and symbol strings. A group of 18 children with dyslexia in 3rd grade (9.05 ± 0.46 years old) was tested before and after following a letter-speech sound mapping training. A group of 20 third-grade typical readers (8.78 ± 0.35 years old) performed a single time on the same brain potential task. The training was differentially effective in speeding up reading fluency in the dyslexic children. In some children, training had a beneficial effect on reading fluency (‘improvers’) while a training effect was absent in others (‘non-im…

Modeling the Early Paths of Phonological Awareness and Factors Supporting its Development in Children With and Without Familial Risk of Dyslexia

The development of phonological awareness (PA) before school age was modeled in association with the development of vocabulary and letter knowledge, home literacy environment (HLE), children's reading interest, and beginning reading skill in children with and without familial risk of dyslexia. A total of 186 children were followed from birth to the age of 6.5 years. Of these children, about half had a familial background of reading difficulties (the at-risk group), and the other half came from families without such background (the control group). The data from several measures and assessment time points were analyzed within an SEM framework, and a latent analysis of growth curves was employ…

Oxytocin reduces romantic rejection-induced pain in online speed-dating as revealed by decreased frontal-midline theta oscillations

Abstract Background Romantic rejection is an emotionally distressful experience profoundly affecting life, possibly leading to mental illness or suicide. Oxytocin (OT) is a neuropeptide widely implicated in reducing physical pain and negative emotions; however, whether OT has an effect on reducing intense social pain (e.g., romantic rejection) remains unknown. Here, we tested the effect of OT on social pain and investigated its role in the outcome evaluation phase of social decision-making. Methods Electroencephalographic recordings were obtained between August 2nd and October 20th, 2020 in Shenzhen University from 61 healthy participants in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study with a b…

Language-specific effects on auditory brain responses in children with dyslexia in four European countries

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…

Detection of sound rise time by adults with dyslexia

Low sensitivity to amplitude modulated (AM) sounds is reported to be associated with dyslexia. An important aspect of amplitude modulation cycles are the rise and fall times within the sound. In this study, simplified stimuli equivalent to just one cycle were used and sensitivity to varying rise times was explored. Adult participants with dyslexia or compensated dyslexia and a control group performed a detection task with sound pairs of different rise times. Results showed that the participants with dyslexia differed from the control group in rise time detection and a correlation was found between rise time detection and reading and phonological skills. A subgroup of participants with lower…

Promoting sixth graders’ credibility evaluation of Web pages: An intervention study

Abstract This study investigated whether a teacher-led intervention program on online inquiry improved sixth graders' performance in a credibility evaluation task. Students (N = 342) were divided into two conditions, an intervention group (190 students) and a control group (152 students). The intervention program (21 × 45 min lessons) was implemented during a six-week course as a part of normal schoolwork. The program included explicit teaching of online inquiry skills: searching for information (3 lessons), evaluating credibility of information (3 lessons), and synthesizing information (3 lessons). In addition, the skills taught were applied in two online inquiry projects comprising 12 les…

Predictors of developmental dyslexia in European orthographies with varying complexity

Background: The relationship between phoneme awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), verbal short-term/working memory (ST/WM) and diagnostic category is investigated in control and dyslexic children, and the extent to which this depends on orthographic complexity. Methods: General cognitive, phonological and literacy skills were tested in 1,138 control and 1,114 dyslexic children speaking six different languages spanning a large range of orthographic complexity (Finnish, Hungarian, German, Dutch, French, English). Results: Phoneme deletion and RAN were strong concurrent predictors of developmental dyslexia, while verbal ST/WM and general verbal abilities played a comparatively minor role…

KIELELLINEN ERITYISVAIKEUS – EI PELKÄSTÄÄN KIELELLISTEN TAITOJEN ONGELMA

Kielellisen erityisvaikeuden ajatellaan olevan ensisijaisesti kielellisten taitojen ongelma. On kuitenkin todennäköistä, että kielelliseen erityisvaikeuteen liittyy myös ei-kielellisiä vaikeuksia. Tämän artikkelin tavoitteena on luoda katsaus eksekutiivisiin toimintoihin ja prosessointinopeuteen osana kielellistä erityisvaikeutta. Tutkimusten perusteella näyttää siltä, että kielelliseen erityisvaikeuteen liittyy kognitiiviseen joustavuuteen, inhibitioon, työmuistiin, tarkkaavuuteen sekä prosessointinopeuteen liittyviä vaikeuksia ainakin osalla kielihäiriöistä lapsista. Kielellisen erityisvaikeuden kliinisessä diagnostiikassa ja kuntoutuksessa on syytä huomioida myös ei-kielelliset vaikeudet…

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…

Associations of Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior with Academic Skills – A Follow-Up Study among Primary School Children

Background There are no prospective studies that would have compared the relationships of different types of physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior (SB) with academic skills among children. We therefore investigated the associations of different types of PA and SB with reading and arithmetic skills in a follow-up study among children. Methods The participants were 186 children (107 boys, 79 girls, 6–8 yr) who were followed-up in Grades 1–3. PA and SB were assessed using a questionnaire in Grade 1. Reading fluency, reading comprehension and arithmetic skills were assessed using standardized tests at the end of Grades 1–3. Results Among all children more recess PA and more time spent i…

Longitudinal interactions between brain and cognitive measures on reading development from 6 months to 14 years

Dyslexia is a neurobiological disorder impairing learning to read. Brain responses of infants at genetic risk for dyslexia are abnormal already at birth, and associations from infant speech perception to preschool cognitive skills and reading in early school years have been documented, but there are no studies showing predicting power until adolescence. Here we show that in at-risk infants, brain activation to pseudowords at left hemisphere predicts 44% of reading speed at 14 years, and even improves the prediction after taking into account neurocognitive preschool measures of letter naming, phonology, and verbal short-term memory. The association between infant brain responses and reading …

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…

Separating mismatch negativity (MMN) response from auditory obligatory brain responses in school-aged children

Mismatch negativity (MMN) overlaps with other auditory event-related potential (ERP) components. We examined the ERPs of 50 9- to 11-year-old children for vowels /i/, /y/ and equivalent complex tones. The goal was to separate MMN from obligatory ERP components using principal component analysis and equal probability control condition. In addition to the contrast of the deviant minus standard response, we employed the contrast of the deviant minus control response, to see whether the obligatory processing contributes to MMN in children. When looking for differences in speech deviant minus standard contrast, MMN starts around 112 ms. However, when both contrasts are examined, MMN emerges for …

Cognitive mechanisms underlying reading and spelling development in five European orthographies

This paper addresses the question whether the cognitive underpinnings of reading and spelling are universal or language/orthography-specific. We analyzed concurrent predictions of phonological processing (awareness and memory) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) for literacy development in a

Auditory event-related potentials show altered hemispheric responses in dyslexia

Dyslexia is characterized by deficits in phonological processing abilities. However, it is unclear what the underlying factors for poor phonological abilities or speech sound representations are. One hypothesis suggests that individuals with dyslexia have problems in basic acoustic perception which in turn can also cause problems in speech perception. Here basic auditory processing was assessed by auditory event-related potentials recorded for paired tones presented in an oddball paradigm in 9-year-old children with dyslexia and a familial background of dyslexia, typically reading children at familial risk for dyslexia and control children without risk for dyslexia. The tone pairs elicited …

Semantic anomaly detection in school-aged children during natural sentence reading : A study of fixation-related brain potentials

In this study, we investigated the effects of context-related semantic anomalies on the fixation-related brain potentials of 12–13-year-old Finnish children in grade 6 during sentence reading. The detection of such anomalies is typically reflected in the N400 event-related potential. We also examined whether the representation invoked by the sentence context extends to the orthographic representation level by replacing the final words of the sentence with an anomalous word neighbour of a plausible word. The eye-movement results show that the anomalous word neighbours of plausible words cause similar first-fixation and gaze duration reactions, as do other anomalous words. Similarly, we obser…

Children with dyslexia reveal abnormal native language representations: Evidence from a study of mismatch negativity

Although a deficit perceiving phonemes, as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN), is apparent in developmental dyslexia (DD), studies have not yet addressed whether this deficit might be a result of deficient native language speech representations. The present study examines how a native-vowel prototype and an atypical vowel are discriminated by 9-year-old children with (n 5 14) and without (n 5 12) DD. MMN was elicited in all conditions in both groups. The control group revealed enhanced MMN to the native-vowel prototype in comparison to the atypical vowel. Children with DD did not show enhanced MMN amplitude to the native-vowel prototype, suggesting impaired tuning to native language s…

Detection of developmental dyslexia with machine learning using eye movement data

Dyslexia is a common neurocognitive learning disorder that can seriously hinder individuals’ aspirations if not detected and treated early. Instead of costly diagnostic assessment made by experts, in the near future dyslexia might be identified with ease by automated analysis of eye movements during reading provided by embedded eye tracking technology. However, the diagnostic machine learning methods need to be optimized first. Previous studies with machine learning have been quite successful in identifying dyslexic readers, however, using contrasting groups with large performance differences between diagnosed and good readers. A practical challenge is to identify also individuals with bord…

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…

Passive exposure to speech sounds modifies change detection brain responses in adults

In early life auditory discrimination ability can be enhanced by passive sound exposure. In contrast, in adulthood passive exposure seems to be insufficient to promote discrimination ability, but this has been tested only with a single short exposure session in humans. We tested whether passive exposure to unfamiliar auditory stimuli can result in enhanced cortical discrimination ability and change detection in adult humans, and whether the possible learning effect generalizes to different stimuli. To address these issues, we exposed adult Finnish participants to Chinese lexical tones passively for 2 h per day on 4 consecutive days. Behavioral responses and the brain's event-related potenti…

Genome-wide association scan identifies new variants associated with a cognitive predictor of dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders, with high impact on school and psychosocial development and high comorbidity with conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, and anxiety. DD is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including word reading, spelling, rapid naming, and phonology. To investigate the genetic basis of DD, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of these skills within one of the largest studies available, including nine cohorts of reading-impaired and typically developing children of European ancestry (N = 2562–3468). We observed a genome-wide significant effect (p < 1 × 10…

Auditory P3a response to native and foreign speech in children with or without attentional deficit

The aim of this study was to investigate the attentional mechanism in speech processing of native and foreign language in children with and without attentional deficit. For this purpose, the P3a component, cognitive neuromarker of the attentional processes, was investigated in a two-sequence two-deviant oddball paradigm using Finnish and English speech items via event-related potentials (ERP) technique. The difference waves reflected the temporal brain dynamics of the P3a response in native and foreign language contexts. Cluster-based permutation tests evaluated the group differences over the P3a time window. A correlation analysis was conducted between the P3a response and the attention sc…

Cross-linguistic study of brain responses to vowel differences in children with dyslexia in four European countries

Assessing reading and online research comprehension: Do difficulties in attention and executive function matter?

This study evaluated the relation between sixth graders' (N = 426) teacher-rated difficulties in attention and executive function (EF) and their comprehension skills. Reading comprehension was assessed with a multiple-choice task and online research and comprehension (ORC) with a problem-solving task. The analyses were controlled for gender, reading fluency and nonverbal reasoning. To investigate differences in students' performance between the tasks, comprehension skills in the multiple-choice task were also controlled for in the ORC task. Structural equation models showed that teacher-rated attention and EF difficulties were related to students' performance more in the problem-solving tas…

Kansainvälistymistä edistämässä

The covariation between parental and expert evaluations of early language skills

This study investigated the potential interrelationship between parental (maternal) and expert assessments of the expressive and receptive language skills of 12- to 18-month-old children. The language activities of 27 children were monitored by their mothers (MCDI scale: Lyytinen, 2000. Varhaisen kommunikaation ja kielen kehityksen arviointimenetelma. Jyvaskylan yliopiston lapsitutkimuskeskus ja Niilo Maki Instituutti. Jyvaskyla: Yliopistopaino. [An assessment tool for early communication and language development] Jyvaskyla: University Press) and trained researchers (Bayley Scales III: Bayley, 2006. Bayley III Scales of Infant Development. Administration Manual. San Antonio, TX: Psychologic…

Enhancement of brain event-related potentials to speech sounds is associated with compensated reading skills in dyslexic children with familial risk for dyslexia

Specific reading disability, dyslexia, is a prevalent and heritable disorder impairing reading acquisition characterized by a phonological deficit. However, the underlying mechanism of how the impaired phonological processing mediates resulting dyslexia or reading disabilities remains still unclear. Using ERPs we studied speech sound processing of 30 dyslexic children with familial risk for dyslexia, 51 typically reading children with familial risk for dyslexia, and 58 typically reading control children. We found enhanced brain responses to shortening of a phonemic length in pseudo-words (/at:a/ vs. /ata/) in dyslexic children with familial risk as compared to other groups. The enhanced bra…

The neural prerequisites of reading

Polymorphisms in DCDC2 and S100B associate with developmental dyslexia

Genetic studies of complex traits have become increasingly successful as progress is made in next-generation sequencing. We aimed at discovering single nucleotide variation present in known and new candidate genes for developmental dyslexia: CYP19A1, DCDC2, DIP2A, DYX1C1, GCFC2 (also known as C2orf3), KIAA0319, MRPL19, PCNT, PRMT2, ROBO1 and S100B. We used next-generation sequencing to identify single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the exons of these 11 genes in pools of 100 DNA samples of Finnish individuals with developmental dyslexia. Subsequent individual genotyping of those 100 individuals, and additional cases and controls from the Finnish and German populations, validated 92 out of 111 …

Basic auditory processing deficits in dyslexia: systematic review of the behavioral and event-related potential/ field evidence.

A review of research that uses behavioral, electroencephalographic, and/or magnetoencephalographic methods to investigate auditory processing deficits in individuals with dyslexia is presented. Findings show that measures of frequency, rise time, and duration discrimination as well as amplitude modulation and frequency modulation detection were most often impaired in individuals with dyslexia. Less consistent findings were found for intensity and gap perception. Additional factors that mediate auditory processing deficits in individuals with dyslexia and their implications are discussed.

Literacy Skills and Online Research and Comprehension : Struggling Readers Face Difficulties

The present study evaluated the extent to which literacy skills (reading fluency, written spelling, and reading comprehension), together with nonverbal reasoning, prior knowledge, and gender, are related to students’ online research and comprehension (ORC) performance. The ORC skills of 426 sixth graders were measured using a Finnish adaptation of the Online Research and Comprehension Assessment. Results of a structural equation model showed that these ORC skills were divided into six highly correlated factors, and that they formed a common factor in ORC. Altogether, these predictor variables explained 57% of the variance in ORC. Reading comprehension, along with gender, was the strongest p…

Reproducibility of Brain Responses: High for Speech Perception, Low for Reading Difficulties

Neuroscience findings have recently received critique on the lack of replications. To examine the reproducibility of brain indices of speech sound discrimination and their role in dyslexia, a specific reading difficulty, brain event-related potentials using EEG were measured using the same cross-linguistic passive oddball paradigm in about 200 dyslexics and 200 typically reading 8–12-year-old children from four countries with different native languages. Brain responses indexing speech and non-speech sound discrimination were extremely reproducible, supporting the validity and reliability of cognitive neuroscience methods. Significant differences between typical and dyslexic readers were fou…

Literacy skills and online research and comprehension: struggling readers face difficulties online

The present study evaluated the extent to which literacy skills (reading fluency, written spelling, and reading comprehension), together with nonverbal reasoning, prior knowledge, and gender, are related to students’ online research and comprehension (ORC) performance. The ORC skills of 426 sixth graders were measured using a Finnish adaptation of the Online Research and Comprehension Assessment. Results of a structural equation model showed that these ORC skills were divided into six highly correlated factors, and that they formed a common factor in ORC. Altogether, these predictor variables explained 57% of the variance in ORC. Reading comprehension, along with gender, was the strongest p…

Precursors and consequences of phonemic length discrimination ability problems in children with reading disabilities and familial risk for dyslexia.

Purpose The authors investigated the importance of phonemic length discrimination ability on reading and spelling skills among children with reading disabilities and familial risk for dyslexia and among children with typical reading skills, as well as the role of prereading skills in reading and spelling development in children with reading disabilities. Method Finnish children with reading disabilities and discrimination problems (RDDP, n = 13), children with reading disabilities and typical discrimination abilities (RDTD, n = 27), and children with typical reading skills (TR, n = 140) were assessed between the ages of 1 and 6.5 years for language, phonological awareness, IQ, verbal memor…

The role of motor system in action-related language comprehension in L1 and L2: An fMRI study

The framework of embodied cognition has challenged the modular view of a language-cognition divide by suggesting that meaning-retrieval critically involves the sensory-motor system. Despite extensive research into the neural mechanisms underlying language-motor coupling, it remains unclear how the motor system might be differentially engaged by different levels of linguistic abstraction and language proficiency. To address this issue, we used fMRI to quantify neural activations in brain regions underlying motor and language processing in Chinese-English speakers’ processing of literal, metaphorical, and abstract language in their L1 and L2. Results overall revealed a response in motor ROIs …

Literacy Skill Development of Children With Familial Risk for Dyslexia Through Grades 2, 3, and 8

This study followed the development of reading speed, reading accuracy, and spelling in transparent Finnish orthography through Grades 2, 3, and 8. We compared two groups of children with familial risk for dyslexia, with or without dyslexia in Grade 2 (Dys_FR, n = 35 and NoDys_FR, n = 66) to a group of children without familial risk and dyslexia (Controls, n = 72). The Dys_FR group showed persisting deficiency especially in reading speed, and, to a minor extent, in reading and spelling accuracy. The Dys_FR children, contrary to the other two groups, relied heavily on letter-by-letter decoding in Grades 2 and 3. In children not fulfilling the criteria for dyslexia in Grade 2, the familial ri…

Infant Event-Related Potentials to Speech are Associated with Prelinguistic Development

Highlights • Speech processing and prelinguistic skills studied in a large longitudinal sample. • Auditory ERPs predicted prelinguistic development in infancy in LCS models. • P1 amplitude at 6 months predicted prelinguistic development between 6 and 12 months. • MMR to a frequency change was associated with prelinguistic skills at 6 months. • Infants’ neural speech processing can help to predict early language development.

Introduction to the special issue on brain event-related potentials as biomarkers of language and literacy development, feedback, and intervention.

Cognitive neuroscience is concerned about increasing our knowledge between different levels of explanation, the etiological level of genes, neural level of brain anatomy and functions, and cognitiv...

The Aromatase Gene CYP19A1: Several Genetic and Functional Lines of Evidence Supporting a Role in Reading, Speech and Language

Inspired by the localization, on 15q21.2 of the CYP19A1 gene in the linkage region of speech and language disorders, and a rare translocation in a dyslexic individual that was brought to our attention, we conducted a series of studies on the properties of CYP19A1 as a candidate gene for dyslexia and related conditions. The aromatase enzyme is a member of the cytochrome P450 super family, and it serves several key functions: it catalyzes the conversion of androgens into estrogens; during early mammalian development it controls the differentiation of specific brain areas (e.g. local estrogen synthesis in the hippocampus regulates synaptic plasticity and axonal growth); it is involved in sexua…

Mismatch brain response to speech sound changes in rats

Understanding speech is based on neural representations of individual speech sounds. In humans, such representations are capable of supporting an automatic and memory-based mechanism for auditory change detection, as reflected by the mismatch negativity of event-related potentials. There are also findings of neural representations of speech sounds in animals, but it is not known whether these representations can support the change detection mechanism analogous to that underlying the mismatch negativity in humans. To this end, we presented synthesized spoken syllables to urethane-anesthetized rats while local field potentials were epidurally recorded above their primary auditory cortex. In a…

Event-related potentials to tones show differences between children with multiple risk factors for dyslexia and control children before the onset of formal reading instruction

Multiple risk factors can affect the development of specific reading problems or dyslexia. In addition to the most prevalent and studied risk factor, phonological processing, also auditory discrimination problems have been found in children and adults with reading difficulties. The present study examined 37 children between the ages of 5 and 6, 11 of which had multiple risk factors for developing reading problems. The children participated in a passive oddball EEG experiment with sinusoidal sounds with changes in sound frequency, duration, or intensity. The responses to the standard stimuli showed a negative voltage shift in children at risk for reading problems compared to control children…

How do gender, Internet activity and learning beliefs predict sixth-grade students’ self-efficacy beliefs in and attitudes towards online inquiry?

Today’s students search, evaluate and actively use Web information in their school assignments, that is, they conduct an online inquiry. This current survey study addresses sixth-grade students’ self-efficacy beliefs in and attitudes towards online inquiry, and to what extent free-time and school-related Internet activity, gender and learning beliefs explain these. The questionnaire was administered in 10 schools to 340 sixth-graders in Finland. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed three elements of self-efficacy beliefs: self-efficacy in Web searching, the evaluation of sources and synthesising information. Furthermore, attitudes towards online inquiry loaded into two fact…

An extensive pattern of atypical neural speech-sound discrimination in newborns at risk of dyslexia.

Objective: Identifying early signs of developmental dyslexia, associated with deficient speech-sound processing, is paramount to establish early interventions. We aimed to find early speech-sound processing deficiencies in dyslexia, expecting diminished and atypically lateralized event-related potentials (ERP) and mismatch responses (MMR) in newborns at dyslexia risk. Methods: ERPs were recorded to a pseudoword and its variants (vowel-duration, vowel-identity, and syllable-frequency changes) from 88 newborns at high or no familial risk. The response significance was tested, and group, laterality, and frontality effects were assessed with repeated-measures ANOVA. Results: An early positive a…

Very early phonological and language skills: estimating individual risk of reading disability

Background: Analyses from the JyvaskylaLongitudinal Study of Dyslexia project show that the key childhood predictors (phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, expressive vocabu- lary, pseudoword repetition, and letter naming) of dyslexia differentiate the group with reading disability (n ¼ 46) and the group without reading problems (n ¼ 152) at the end of the 2nd grade. These measures were employed at the ages of 3.5, 4.5 and 5.5 years and information regarding the familial risk of dyslexia was used to find the most sensitive indices of an individual child's risk for reading disabil- ity. Methods: Age-specific and across-age logistic regression models were constructed to pro…

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…

Chapter 5. Affordances and challenges of digital reading for individuals with different learning profiles

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…

Influence of reading skill and word length on fixation-related brain activity in school-aged children during natural reading

Word length is one of the main determinants of eye movements during reading and has been shown to influence slow readers more strongly than typical readers. The influence of word length on reading in individuals with different reading skill levels has been shown in separate eye-tracking and electroencephalography studies. However, the influence of reading difficulty on cortical correlates of word length effect during natural reading is unknown. To investigate how reading skill is related to brain activity during natural reading, we performed an exploratory analysis on our data set from a previous study, where slow reading (N = 27) and typically reading (N = 65) 12-to-13.5-year-old children …

Investigating elementary school students’ text-based argumentation with multiple online information resources

In this study, we explored how elementary school students used multiple information resources in responding to a text-based argumentation task asking them to research a set of online texts in order to state and justify their stance on a controversial health-related issue. Results showed that most students took a stance that was consistent with the majority of the information resources that they read, that they mainly drew on more reliable resources in their written task products, and that they justified their stance by providing one or more supporting reasons. Students relied much more on copying and paraphrasing content from the online resources than on integrating information within and a…

Auditory event-related potentials (ERP) reflect temporal changes in speech stimuli

We studied the brain's reactions to deviations in the duration of a stop consonant using event-related potentials in an oddball paradigm. A naturally produced nonsense word was used as a frequent standard stimulus which differed from two infrequently presented deviant stimuli only by the duration of the silence period inside the stop, making the consonant sound longer. Evoked responses to the deviant stimuli showed sharply rising negativity after the unexpected prolongation of the silence and a later negativity, the duration of which was related to the timing of the beginning of the second part of the deviant sound. This later negativity is, at least partly, elicited by a mismatch process t…

Social exclusion influences conditioned fear acquisition and generalization: A mediating effect from the medial prefrontal cortex

Abstract Fear acquisition and generalization play key roles in promoting the survival of mammals and contribute to anxiety disorders. While previous research has provided much evidence for the repercussions of social exclusion on mental health, how social exclusion affects fear acquisition and generalization has received scant attention. In our study, participants were divided into two groups according to two Cyberball paradigm conditions (exclusion/inclusion). Both groups underwent a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and skin conductance response (SCR) assessments. We aimed to determine the effects of social exclusion on fear acquisition and ge…

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…

Brain responses of dysphoric and control participants during a self-esteem implicit association test.

Previous studies have reported lowered implicit self-esteem at the behavioral level among depressed individuals. However, brain responses related to the lowered implicit self-esteem have not been investigated in people with depression. Here, event-related potentials were measured in 28 dysphoric participants (individuals with elevated amounts of depressive symptoms) and 30 control participants during performance of an implicit association task (IAT) suggested to reflect implicit self-esteem. Despite equivalent behavioral performance, differences in brain responses were observed between the dysphoric and the control groups in late positive component (LPC) within 400-1,000 ms poststimulus lat…

Associations of Motor and Cardiovascular Performance with Academic Skills in Children

HAAPALA, E. A., A.-M. POIKKEUS, T. TOMPURI, K. KUKKONEN-HARJULA, P. H. T. LEPPANEN, V. LINDI, and T. A. LAKKA. Associations of Motor and Cardiovascular Performance with Academic Skills in Children. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc. ,V ol. 46, No. 5, pp. 1016-1024, 2014. Purpose: We investigated the associations of cardiovascular and motor performance in grade 1 with academic skills in grades 1-3. Methods: The participants were 6- to 8-yr-old children with complete data in grades 1-2 for 174 children and in grade 3 for 167 children. Maximal workload during exercise test was used as a measure of cardiovascular performance. The shuttle run test (SRT) time, the errors in balance test, and the number of c…

Separating mismatch negativity (MMN) from obligatory brain responses for speech and non-speech sounds in school-aged children

A Performance-Based Test for Assessing Students’ Online Inquiry Competences in Schools

In this paper, we introduce a performance-based test for measuring adolescents’ competences in online inquiry. The test covers four competence dimensions: (1) searching and selecting relevant sources, (2) identifying the main ideas presented in the sources, (3) evaluating the credibility of the sources, and (4) synthesizing information across the sources. We implement a technological solution called NEURONE to carry out this routine. The scoring of the test data is demonstrated by presenting preliminary results of a case study. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limitations of the test.

Developmental links of very early phonological and language skills to second grade reading outcomes: strong to accuracy but only minor to fluency.

The authors examined second grade reading accuracy and fluency and their associations via letter knowledge to phonological and language predictors assessed at 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 years in children in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. Structural equation modeling showed that a developmentally highly stable factor (early phonological and language processing [EPLP]) behind key dyslexia predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, vocabulary, and pseudoword repetition) could already be identified at 3.5 years. EPLP was significantly associated with reading and spelling accuracy and by age with letter knowledge. However, EPLP had only a minor link with re…

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…

Exploring early adolescents’ evaluation of academic and commercial online resources related to health

This study assessed the ability of 426 students (ages 12–13) to critically evaluate two types of online locations on health issues: an academic resource and a commercial resource. The results indicated limited evaluation abilities, especially for the commercial resource, and only a small, partial association with prior stance and offline reading ability. Only about half (51.4%) of the students questioned the credibility of the commercial online resource and only about 19% of the students showed an ability to fully recognize commercial bias. Wide variation existed in students’ ability to evaluate online information, as approximately one-fourth of the students performed poorly when evaluating…

Neural correlates of morphological processing and its development from pre-school to the first grade in children with and without familial risk for dyslexia

Previous studies have shown that the development of morphological awareness and reading skills are interlinked. However, most have focused on phonological awareness as a risk factor for dyslexia, although there is considerable diversity in the underlying causes of this reading difficulty. Specifically, the relationship between phonology, derivational morphology, and dyslexia in the Finnish language remains unclear. In the present study, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the brain responses to correctly and incorrectly derived Finnish nouns in 34 first grade Finnish children (21 typically developing and 13 with familial risk for dyslexia). In addition, we compared longitudinall…

Accelerating decoding-related skills in poor readers learning a foreign language: a computer-based intervention

The results of Fast ForWord® training on English decoding-related skills were examined. Finnish fifth-grade students were identified as having reading fluency problems and poor skills in English as a foreign language learned at school and were randomly assigned to either a training group (TRG) or a control group. The TRG (n = 13) received 50 min of daily computer program-based training for a period of approximately 10 weeks. Students in the first control group (n = 11) received the school’s regular instructional programme. A second control group was composed of 14 average readers. The students’ English skills were examined in pre-test, post-test and follow-up measurements. The TRG students …

Sixth graders’ evaluation strategies when reading Internet search results : an eye-tracking study

Eye-tracking technology was used to examine Internet search result evaluation strategies adopted by sixth-grade students (N = 36) during ten experimental information search tasks. The relevancy of the search result’s title, URL, and snippet components was manipulated and selection of search results as well as looking into probabilities on the search result components was analysed. The results revealed that during first-pass inspection, students read the search engine page by first looking at the title of a search result. If the title was relevant, the probability of looking at the snippet of the search result increased. During second-pass inspection, there was a high probability of students…

Auditory Event-Related Potentials in the Study of Developmental Language-Related Disorders

This article reviews recent auditory event-related potential (ERP) studies of developmental language disorder (DLD) and dyslexia/reading disorder (RD). The possibility of using ERPs in searching for precursors of these disorders in the early development of infants at risk is also discussed. Differences in exogenous/sensory ERPs at the latency range of P1 and N1-P2 components have been reported between groups with DLD and RD and control groups. Latency differences between the groups may be related to a common timing deficit suggested by some researchers to be one of the possible underlying factors both in DLD and dyslexia. N1 amplitude group differences may be partly related to arousal/atten…

What information should I look for again? : Attentional difficulties distracts reading of task assignments

This large-scale eye-movement study (N = 164) investigated how students read short task assignments to complete information search problems and how their cognitive resources are associated with this reading behavior. These cognitive resources include information searching subskills, prior knowledge, verbal memory, reading fluency, and attentional difficulties. In this study, the task assignments consisted of four sentences. The first and last sentences provided context, while the second or third sentence was the relevant or irrelevant sentence under investigation. The results of a linear mixed-model and latent change score analyses showed the ubiquitous influence of reading fluency on first…

Revealing “genuine” mismatch negativity (MMN) in school-aged children

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…

Cry characteristics of 172 healthy 1-to 7-day-old infants.

A total of 1,836 cry signals from 172 healthy babies, 1–7 days old, were analysed with sound spectrography. The mean values for the 8–15 cries from each infant were calculated and used for the statistical analyses. The mean duration of the cry signals was 1.4 ± 0.6 s. The mean fundamental frequency was 496 ± 95 cps (Hz). Fifty percent of the mean fundamental frequencies in the 8–15 cries analysed from each baby varied between 450 and 520 Hz. Of the children, 93% had cries with a mean fundamental frequency below 600 Hz. The mean value of the highest point of the fundamental frequency was 583 ± 151 Hz and of the lowest point 398 ± 75 Hz. The melody type had mainly a rising-falling contour, th…

Genetic analysis of dyslexia candidate genes in the European cross-linguistic NeuroDys cohort

The work conducted at the WTCHG was supported by Wellcome Trust grants [076566/Z/05/Z] and [075491/Z/04]; the work in Zurich partly by an SNSF grant [32-108130]. We also thank MAF (Mutation Analysis core Facility) at the Karolinska Institute, Novum, Huddinge. The French part of the project was funded by Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-06-NEURO-019-01 GENEDYS) and Ville de Paris. S Paracchini is a Royal Society University Research Fellow. D Czamara was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) within the framework of the Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology (EXC 1010 SyNergy). Dyslexia is one of the most common childhood disorders with a prevalence o…

Fixation-related potentials in naming speed: A combined EEG and eye-tracking study on children with dyslexia.

Abstract Objective We combined electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking recordings to examine the underlying factors elicited during the serial Rapid-Automatized Naming (RAN) task that may differentiate between children with dyslexia (DYS) and chronological age controls (CAC). Methods Thirty children with DYS and 30 CAC (Mage = 9.79 years; age range 7.6 through 12.1 years) performed a set of serial RAN tasks. We extracted fixation-related potentials (FRPs) under phonologically similar (rime-confound) or visually similar (resembling lowercase letters) and dissimilar (non-confounding and discrete uppercase letters, respectively) control tasks. Results Results revealed significant differe…

Event-related brain potentials to change in the frequency and temporal structure of sounds in typically developing 5-6-year-old children.

The brain's ability to recognize different acoustic cues (e.g., frequency changes in rapid temporal succession) is important for speech perception and thus for successful language development. Here we report on distinct event-related potentials (ERPs) in 5-6-year-old children recorded in a passive oddball paradigm to repeated tone pair stimuli with a frequency change in the second tone in the pair, replicating earlier findings. An occasional insertion of a third tone within the tone pair generated a more merged pattern, which has not been reported previously in 5-6-year-old children. Both types of deviations elicited pre-attentive discriminative mismatch negativity (MMN) and late discrimina…

ERP correlates of within-category vowel comparisons between prototypical and atypical vowel sounds in children with and without aphasia

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…

ERP denoising in multichannel EEG data using contrasts between signal and noise subspaces

Abstract In this paper, a new method intended for ERP denoising in multichannel EEG data is discussed. The denoising is done by separating ERP/noise subspaces in multidimensional EEG data by a linear transformation and the following dimension reduction by ignoring noise components during inverse transformation. The separation matrix is found based on the assumption that ERP sources are deterministic for all repetitions of the same type of stimulus within the experiment, while the other noise sources do not obey the determinancy property. A detailed derivation of the technique is given together with the analysis of the results of its application to a real high-density EEG data set. The inter…

Electrophysiological correlates of cross-linguistic semantic integration in hearing signers : N400 and LPC

We explored semantic integration mechanisms in native and non-native hearing users of sign language and non-signing controls. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a semantic decision task for priming lexeme pairs. Pairs were presented either within speech or across speech and sign language. Target-related ERP responses were subjected to principal component analyses (PCA), and neurocognitive basis of semantic integration processes were assessed by analyzing the N400 and the late positive complex (LPC) components in response to spoken (auditory) and signed (visual) antonymic and unrelated targets. Semantically-related effects triggered across modali…

Genome Wide Association Scan identifies new variants associated with a cognitive predictor of dyslexia

AbstractDevelopmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders among children and is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including reading, spelling, short term memory and others. To help unravel the genetic basis of these skills, we conducted a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS), including nine cohorts of reading-impaired and typically developing children of European ancestry, recruited across different countries (N=2,562-3,468).We observed a genome-wide significant effect (p&lt;1×10−8) on rapid automatized naming of letters (RANlet) for variants on 18q12.2 withinMIR924HG (micro-RNA 924 host gene;p= 4.73×10−9), and a suggestive association on 8q1…

Development of auditory processing ability in children with dyslexia

Reading to Learn From Online Information: Modeling the Factor Structure

Identifying the factor structure of online reading to learn is important for the development of theory, assessment, and instruction. Traditional comprehension models have been developed from, and for, offline reading. This study used online reading to determine an optimal factor structure for modeling online research and comprehension among 426 sixth graders (ages 12 and 13). Confirmatory factor analysis was employed to evaluate an assessment of online research and comprehension based on a widely referenced theoretical model. Student performance reflected the theoretical constructs of the model, but several additional constructs appeared, resulting in a six-factor model: (a) locating infor…

Accelerating early language development with multi-sensory training

This paper reports the outcome of a multi-sensory intervention on infant language skills. A programme titled ‘Rhyming Game and Exercise Club’, which included kinaesthetic–tactile mother–child rhyming games performed in natural joint attention situations, was intended to accelerate Finnish six- to eight-month-old infants’ language development. The participants were 20 infants (10 training group children and 10 control children). Their cognitive skills and both receptive and expressive language skills (Bayley Scales III) were tested three times (pre-, post- and follow-up assessments). The groups differed significantly in receptive language skills at the baseline, in favour of the controls. Th…

Brain ERPs to changes of speech segment durations in six-month-olds