Oscillatory Dynamics Underlying Perceptual Narrowing of Native Phoneme Mapping from 6 to 12 Months of Age

During the first months of life, human infants process phonemic elements from all languages similarly. However, by 12 months of age, as language-specific phonemic maps are established, infants respond preferentially to their native language. This process, known as perceptual narrowing, supports neural representation and thus efficient processing of the distinctive phonemes within the sound environment. Although oscillatory mechanisms underlying processing of native and non-native phonemic contrasts were recently delineated in 6-month-old infants, the maturational trajectory of these mechanisms remained unclear. A group of typically developing infants born into monolingual English families, …

Both contextual regularity and selective attention affect the reduction of precision‐weighted prediction errors but in distinct manners

Predictive coding model of perception postulates that the primary objective of the brain is to infer the causes of sensory inputs by reducing prediction errors (i.e., the discrepancy between expected and actual information). Moreover, prediction errors are weighted by their precision (i.e., inverse variance), which quantifies the degree of certainty about the variables. There is accumulating evidence that the reduction of precision-weighted prediction errors can be affected by contextual regularity (as an external factor) and selective attention (as an internal factor). However, it is unclear whether the two factors function together or separately. Here we used electroencephalography (EEG) …

Dyslexia—Early Identification and Prevention: Highlights from the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia

Over two decades of Finnish research, monitoring children born with risk for dyslexia has been carried out in the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). Two hundred children, half at risk, have been assessed from birth to puberty on hundreds of measures. The aims were to identify measures of prediction of later reading difficulty and to instigate appropriate and earliest diagnosis and intervention. We can identify at-risk children from newborn electroencephalographic brain recordings (Guttorm et al., J Neural Transm 110:1059–1074, 2003). Predictors are also apparent from late-talking infants who have familial background of dyslexia (Lyytinen and Lyytinen, Appl Psycolinguistics 25:3…

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…

Magnetoencephalography Responses to Unpredictable and Predictable Rare Somatosensory Stimuli in Healthy Adult Humans

Mismatch brain responses to unpredicted rare stimuli are suggested to be a neural indicator of prediction error, but this has rarely been studied in the somatosensory modality. Here, we investigated how the brain responds to unpredictable and predictable rare events. Magnetoencephalography responses were measured in adults frequently presented with somatosensory stimuli (FRE) that were occasionally replaced by two consecutively presented rare stimuli [unpredictable rare stimulus (UR) and predictable rare stimulus (PR); p = 0.1 for each]. The FRE and PR were electrical stimulations administered to either the little finger or the forefinger in a counterbalanced manner between the two conditio…

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…

Distinctive Representation of Mispredicted and Unpredicted Prediction Errors in Human Electroencephalography

The predictive coding model of perception proposes that neuronal responses are modulated by the amount of sensory input that the internal prediction cannot account for (i.e., prediction error). However, there is little consensus on what constitutes nonpredicted stimuli. Conceptually, whereas mispredicted stimuli may induce both prediction error generated by prediction that is not perceived and prediction error generated by sensory input that is not anticipated, unpredicted stimuli involves no top-down, only bottom-up, propagation of information in the system. Here, we examined the possibility that the processing of mispredicted and unpredicted stimuli are dissociable at the neurophysiologic…

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…

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…

Enhancement of Gamma Oscillations Indicates Preferential Processing of Native over Foreign Phonemic Contrasts in Infants

Young infants discriminate phonetically relevant speech contrasts in a universal manner, that is, similarly across languages. This ability fades by 12 months of age as the brain builds language-specific phonemic maps and increasingly responds preferentially to the infant's native language. However, the neural mechanisms that underlie the development of infant preference for native over non-native phonemes remain unclear. Since gamma-band power is known to signal infants' preference for native language rhythm, we hypothesized that it might also indicate preference for native phonemes. Using high-density electroencephalogram/event-related potential (EEG/ERP) recordings and source-localization…

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

Unveiling the Mysteries of Dyslexia-Lessons Learned from the Prospective Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia.

This paper reviews the observations of the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). The JLD is a prospective family risk study in which the development of children with familial risk for dyslexia (N = 108) due to parental dyslexia and controls without dyslexia risk (N = 92) were followed from birth to adulthood. The JLD revealed that the likelihood of at-risk children performing poorly in reading and spelling tasks was fourfold compared to the controls. Auditory insensitivity of newborns observed during the first week of life using brain event-related potentials (ERPs) was shown to be the first precursor of dyslexia. ERPs measured at six months of age related to phoneme length identi…

Neural generators of the frequency-following response elicited to stimuli of low and high frequency: A magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study.

The frequency-following response (FFR) to periodic complex sounds has gained recent interest in auditory cognitive neuroscience as it captures with great fidelity the tracking accuracy of the periodic sound features in the ascending auditory system. Seminal studies suggested the FFR as a correlate of subcortical sound encoding, yet recent studies aiming to locate its sources challenged this assumption, demonstrating that FFR receives some contribution from the auditory cortex. Based on frequency-specific phase-locking capabilities along the auditory hierarchy, we hypothesized that FFRs to higher frequencies would receive less cortical contribution than those to lower frequencies, hence supp…

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…

Prior Precision Modulates the Minimization of Auditory Prediction Error

International audience; The predictive coding model of perception proposes that successful representation of the perceptual world depends upon canceling out the discrepancy between prediction and sensory input (i.e., prediction error). Recent studies further suggest a distinction to be made between prediction error triggered by non-predicted stimuli of different prior precision (i.e., inverse variance). However, it is not fully understood how prediction error with different precision levels is minimized in the predictive process. Here, we conducted a magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment which orthogonally manipulated prime-probe relation (for contextual precision) and stimulus repetition…

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…

Coherence between brain activation and speech envelope at word and sentence levels showed age-related differences in low frequency bands

Abstract Speech perception is dynamic and shows changes across development. In parallel, functional differences in brain development over time have been well documented and these differences may interact with changes in speech perception during infancy and childhood. Further, there is evidence that the two hemispheres contribute unequally to speech segmentation at the sentence and phonemic levels. To disentangle those contributions, we studied the cortical tracking of various sized units of speech that are crucial for spoken language processing in children (4.7–9.3 years old, N = 34) and adults (N = 19). We measured participants’ magnetoencephalogram (MEG) responses to syllables, words, and…

Both contextual regularity and selective attention affect the reduction of precision‐weighted prediction errors but in distinct manners

Predictive coding model of perception postulates that the primary objective of the brain is to infer the causes of sensory inputs by reducing prediction errors (i.e., the discrepancy between expected and actual information). Moreover, prediction errors are weighted by their precision (i.e., inverse variance), which quantifies the degree of certainty about the variables. There is accumulating evidence that the reduction of precision‐weighted prediction errors can be affected by contextual regularity (as an external factor) and selective attention (as an internal factor). However, it is unclear whether the two factors function together or separately. Here we used electroencephalography (EEG) …

Behavioral and Brain Measures of Morphological Processing in Children With and Without Familial Risk for Dyslexia From Pre-school to First Grade

School-age reading skills are associated with and predicted by preschool-age cognitive risk factors for dyslexia, such as deficits in phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, letter knowledge, and verbal short-term memory. In addition, evidence exists that problems in morphological information processing could be considered a risk factor for dyslexia. In the present study, 27 children at pre-school age and the same 27 children at first grade age performed a morphological awareness task while their brain responses were measured with magnetoencephalography. Our aim was to examine how derivational morphology in Finnish language, and concomitant accuracy and reaction times are associat…

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…

Temporal expectation and spectral expectation operate in distinct fashion on neuronal populations

The formation of temporal expectation (i.e., the prediction of ‘when’) is of prime importance to sensory processing. It can modulate sensory processing at early processing stages probably via the entrainment of low-frequency neuronal oscillations in the brain. However, sensory predictions involve not only temporal expectation but also spectral expectation (i.e., the prediction of ‘what’). Here we investigated how temporal expectation may interrelate with spectral expectation by explicitly setting up temporal expectation and spectral expectation in a target detection task. We found that temporal expectation and spectral expectation interacted on reaction time (RT). RT was shorter when target…

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…

Neural Responses to Musical Rhythm in Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties

The perception of the musical rhythm has been suggested as one of the predicting factors for reading abilities. Several studies have demonstrated that children with reading difficulties (RD) show reduced neural sensitivity in musical rhythm perception. Despite this prior evidence, the association between music and reading in Chinese is still controversial. In the present study, we sought to answer the question of whether the musical rhythm perception of Chinese children with RD is intact or not, providing further clues on how reading and music might be interlinked across languages. Oddball paradigm was adapted for testing the difference of musical rhythm perception, including predictable an…

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…

Discriminatory Brain Processes of Native and Foreign Language in Children with and without Reading Difficulties

The association between impaired speech perception and reading difficulty has been well established in native language processing, as can be observed from brain activity. However, there has been scarce investigation of whether this association extends to brain activity during foreign language processing. The relationship between reading skills and neuronal speech representation of foreign language remains unclear. In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) with high-density EEG to investigate this question. Eleven- to 13-year-old children typically developed (CTR) or with reading difficulties (RD) were tested via a passive auditory oddball paradigm containing native (Finn…

Behavioral and Brain Measures of Morphological Processing in Children With and Without Familial Risk for Dyslexia From Pre-school to First Grade

School-age reading skills are associated with and predicted by preschool-age cognitive risk factors for dyslexia, such as deficits in phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, letter knowledge, and verbal short-term memory. In addition, evidence exists that problems in morphological information processing could be considered a risk factor for dyslexia. In the present study, 27 children at pre-school age and the same 27 children at first grade age performed a morphological awareness task while their brain responses were measured with magnetoencephalography. Our aim was to examine how derivational morphology in Finnish language, and concomitant accuracy and reaction times are associat…

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 …

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 …

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…

Brain Responses to Letters and Speech Sounds and Their Correlations With Cognitive Skills Related to Reading in Children

Letter-speech sound (LSS) integration is crucial for initial stages of reading acquisition. However, the relationship between cortical organization for supporting LSS integration, including unimodal and multimodal processes, and reading skills in early readers remains unclear. In the present study, we measured brain responses to Finnish letters and speech sounds from 29 typically developing Finnish children in a child-friendly audiovisual integration experiment using magnetoencephalography. Brain source activations in response to auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli as well as audiovisual integration response were correlated with reading skills and cognitive skills predictive of reading…

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…

Passive exposure to speech sounds induces long-term memory representations in the auditory cortex of adult rats

AbstractExperience-induced changes in the functioning of the auditory cortex are prominent in early life, especially during a critical period. Although auditory perceptual learning takes place automatically during this critical period, it is thought to require active training in later life. Previous studies demonstrated rapid changes in single-cell responses of anesthetized adult animals while exposed to sounds presented in a statistical learning paradigm. However, whether passive exposure to sounds can form long-term memory representations remains to be demonstrated. To investigate this issue, we first exposed adult rats to human speech sounds for 3 consecutive days, 12 h/d. Two groups of …

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

Prior precision modulates the minimisation of prediction error in human auditory cortex

AbstractThe predictive coding model of perception proposes that successful representation of the perceptual world depends upon cancelling out the discrepancy between prediction and sensory input (i.e., prediction error). Recent studies further suggest a distinction between prediction error associated with non-predicted stimuli of different prior precision (i.e., inverse variance). However, it is not fully understood how prediction error from different precision levels is minimised in the predictive process. The current research used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine whether prior precision modulates the cortical dynamics of the making of perceptual inferences. We presented participant…

Rapid changes in brain activity during learning of grapheme-phoneme associations in adults

ABSTRACTLearning to associate written letters with speech sounds is crucial for the initial phase of acquiring reading skills. However, little is known about the cortical reorganization for supporting letter-speech sound learning, particularly the brain dynamics during the learning of grapheme-phoneme associations. In the present study, we trained 30 Finnish participants (mean age: 24.33 years, SD: 3.50 years) to associate novel foreign letters with familiar Finnish speech sounds on two consecutive days (first day ~ 50 minutes; second day ~ 25 minutes), while neural activity was measured using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Two sets of audiovisual stimuli were used for the training in which …

The auditory N1 suppression rebounds as prediction persists over time

International audience; The predictive coding model of perception proposes that neuronal responses reflect prediction errors. Repeated as well as predicted stimuli trigger suppressed neuronal responses because they are associated with reduced prediction errors. However, many predictable events in our environment are not isolated but sequential, yet there is little empirical evidence documenting how suppressed neuronal responses reflecting reduced prediction errors change in the course of a predictable sequence of events. Here we conceived an auditory electroencephalography (EEG) experiment where prediction persists over series of four tones to allow for the delineation of the dynamics of th…

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…

Repetition suppression comprises both attention-independent and attention-dependent processes.

International audience; Repetition suppression, a robust phenomenon of reduction in neural responses to stimulus repetition, is suggested to consist of a combination of bottom-up adaptation and top-down prediction effects. However, there is little consensus on how repetition suppression is related to attention in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. It is probably because fMRI integrates neural activity related to adaptation and prediction effects, which are respectively attention-independent and attention-dependent. Here we orthogonally manipulated stimulus repetition and attention in a target detection task while participants' electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. In…

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.

Deviance detection in sound frequency in simple and complex sounds in urethane-anesthetized rats

Mismatch negativity (MMN), which is an electrophysiological response demonstrated in humans and animals, reflects memory-based deviance detection in a series of sounds. However, only a few studies on rodents have used control conditions that were sufficient in eliminating confounding factors that could also explain differential responses to deviant sounds. Furthermore, it is unclear if change detection occurs similarly for sinusoidal and complex sounds. In this study, we investigated frequency change detection in urethane-anesthetized rats by recording local-field potentials from the dura above the auditory cortex. We studied change detection in sinusoidal and complex sounds in a series of …

Determining the number of sources in high-density EEG recordings of event-related potentials by model order selection

To high-density electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, determining the number of sources to separate the signal and the noise subspace is very important. A mostly used criterion is that percentage of variance of raw data explained by the selected principal components composing the signal space should be over 90%. Recently, a model order selection method named as GAP has been proposed. We investigated the two methods by performing independent component analysis (ICA) on the estimated signal subspace, assuming the number of selected principal components composing the signal subspace is equal to the number of sources of brain activities. Through examining wavelet-filtered EEG recordings (128…

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…

Load-dependent alpha suppression is related to working memory capacity for numbers

Alpha suppression is proposed to reflect a surge in cortical excitability to enhance stimulus processing in working memory. The attenuated state of alpha might reflect the prioritisation of behaviourally relevant information, making it a proxy for working memory functioning. Despite the growing interest in utilising the advancement of brain-based measures to evaluate individuals’ cognitive processes, there was a lack of consistent evidence on the relationship between alpha suppression and working memory performance. To investigate whether interindividual differences in alpha suppression might be related to variability in working memory capacity, we recorded participants’ electroencephalogra…

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…

Time course of ERP generators to syllables in infants: A source localization study using age-appropriate brain templates

article i nfo Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become an important tool in the quest to understand how infants pro- cess perceptual information. Identification of the activation loci of the ERP generators is a technique that pro- vides an opportunity to explore the neural substrates that underlie auditory processing. Nevertheless, as infant brain templates from healthy, non-clinical samples have not been available, the majority of source localization studies in infants have used non-realistic head models, or brain templates derived from older children or adults. Given the dramatic structural changes seen across infancy, all of which profoundly affect the electrical fields measured with …

Change detection to tone pairs during the first year of life – Predictive longitudinal relationships for EEG-based source and time-frequency measures

Abstract Brain responses related to auditory processing show large changes throughout infancy and childhood with some evidence that the two hemispheres might mature at different rates. Differing rates of hemispheric maturation could be linked to the proposed functional specialization of the hemispheres in which the left auditory cortex engages in analysis of precise timing information whereas the right auditory cortex focuses on analysis of sound frequency. Here the auditory change detection process for rapidly presented tone-pairs was examined in a longitudinal sample of infants at the age of 6 and 12 months using EEG. The ERP response related to change detection of a frequency contrast, i…

Auditory‐evoked potentials to changes in sound duration in urethane‐anaesthetized mice

Spectrotemporally complex sounds carry important information for acoustic communication. Among the important features of these sounds is the temporal duration. An event-related potential called mismatch negativity indexes auditory change detection in humans. An analogous response (mismatch response) has been found to duration changes in speech sounds in rats but not yet in mice. We addressed whether mice show this response, and, if elicited, whether this response is functionally analogous to mismatch negativity or whether adaptation-based models suffice to explain them. Auditory-evoked potentials were epidurally recorded above the mice auditory cortex. The differential response to the chang…

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 …

Detection of rise time and its connections to speech perception and reading ability

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

Top-Down Predictions of Familiarity and Congruency in Audio-Visual Speech Perception at Neural Level

During speech perception, listeners rely on multimodal input and make use of both auditory and visual information. When presented with speech, for example syllables, the differences in brain responses to distinct stimuli are not, however, caused merely by the acoustic or visual features of the stimuli. The congruency of the auditory and visual information and the familiarity of a syllable, that is, whether it appears in the listener’s native language or not, also modulates brain responses. We investigated how the congruency and familiarity of the presented stimuli affect brain responses to audio-visual (AV) speech in 12 adult Finnish native speakers and 12 adult Chinese native speakers. The…

Unveiling the Mysteries of Dyslexia : Lessons Learned from the Prospective Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia

This paper reviews the observations of the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). The JLD is a prospective family risk study in which the development of children with familial risk for dyslexia (N = 108) due to parental dyslexia and controls without dyslexia risk (N = 92) were followed from birth to adulthood. The JLD revealed that the likelihood of at-risk children performing poorly in reading and spelling tasks was fourfold compared to the controls. Auditory insensitivity of newborns observed during the first week of life using brain event-related potentials (ERPs) was shown to be the first precursor of dyslexia. ERPs measured at six months of age related to phoneme length identi…

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…

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…

Top-Down Predictions of Familiarity and Congruency in Audio-Visual Speech Perception at Neural Level

During speech perception, listeners rely on multimodal input and make use of both auditory and visual information. When presented with speech, for example syllables, the differences in brain responses to distinct stimuli are not, however, caused merely by the acoustic or visual features of the stimuli. The congruency of the auditory and visual information and the familiarity of a syllable, that is, whether it appears in the listener's native language or not, also modulates brain responses. We investigated how the congruency and familiarity of the presented stimuli affect brain responses to audio-visual (AV) speech in 12 adult Finnish native speakers and 12 adult Chinese native speakers. The…

Both attention and prediction are necessary for adaptive neuronal tuning in sensory processing

International audience; The brain as a proactive system processes sensory information under the top-down influence of attention and prediction. However, the relation between attention and prediction remains undetermined given the conflation of these two mechanisms in the literature. To evaluate whether attention and prediction are dependent of each other, and if so, how these two top-down mechanisms may interact in sensory processing, we orthogonally manipulated attention and prediction in a target detection task. Participants were instructed to pay attention to one of two interleaved stimulus streams of predictable/unpredictable tone frequency. We found that attention and prediction intera…

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…

Source localization of event-related potentials to pitch change mapped onto age-appropriate MRIs at 6 months-of-age

Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to understand how the brain processes auditory input, and to track developmental change in sensory systems. Localizing ERP generators can provide invaluable insights into how and where auditory information is processed. However, age-appropriate infant brain templates have not been available to aid such developmental mapping. In this study, auditory change detection responses of brain ERPs were examined in 6-month-old infants using discrete and distributed source localization methods mapped onto age-appropriate magnetic resonance images. Infants received a passive oddball paradigm using fast-rate non-linguistic auditory stimuli (tone do…

Context-dependent minimisation of prediction errors involves temporal-frontal activation

According to the predictive coding model of perception, the brain constantly generates predictions of the upcoming sensory inputs. Perception is realised through a hierarchical generative model which aims at minimising the discrepancy between predictions and the incoming sensory inputs (i.e., prediction errors). Notably, prediction errors are weighted depending on precision of prior information. However, it remains unclear whether and how the brain monitors prior precision when minimising prediction errors in different contexts. The current study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to address this question. We presented participants with repetition of two non-predicted probes embedded in cont…

The processing of mispredicted and unpredicted sensory inputs interact differently with attention

International audience; Prediction and attention are fundamental brain functions in the service of perception. Interestingly, previous investigations found prediction effects independent of attention in some cases but attention-dependent in other cases. The discrepancy might be related to whether the prediction effect was revealed by comparing mis-predicted event (where there is incorrect prediction) or unpredicted event (where there is no precise prediction) against predicted event, which are associated with different precision-weighted prediction error. Here we conducted a joint analysis on four published electroencephalography (EEG) datasets which allow for proper dissociation of mispred…

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…

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…

Dynamics of brain activation during learning of syllable-symbol paired associations.

| openaire: EC/H2020/641652/EU//ChildBrain Initial stages of reading acquisition require the learning of letter and speech sound combinations. While the long-term effects of audio-visual learning are rather well studied, relatively little is known about the short-term learning effects at the brain level. Here we examined the cortical dynamics of short-term learning using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) in two experiments that respectively addressed active and passive learning of the association between shown symbols and heard syllables. In experiment 1, learning was based on feedback provided after each trial. The learning of the audio-visual associations was c…

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…

Auditory event-related potentials over medial frontal electrodes express both negative and positive prediction errors

International audience; While the neuronal activation in the medial frontal cortex is thought to reflect higher-order evaluation processes of reward prediction errors when a reward deviates from our expectation, there is increasing evidence that the medial frontal activity might express prediction errors in general. However, given that several studies examined the medial frontal event-related potentials (ERPs) by comparing signals triggered by different stimuli and different anticipations, it remains an open question whether the medial frontal signals are sensitive to the valence of prediction errors. Here we orthogonally manipulated expectation magnitude (i.e., large/small expectation) and…

Passive sound exposure induces rapid perceptual learning in musicians: event-related potential evidence.

Musicians show enhanced auditory processing compared to nonmusicians. However, the neural basis underlying the effects of musical training on rapid plasticity in auditory processing has not been systematically studied. Here, the rapid (one session) learning-related plastic changes in event-related potential (ERP) responses for pitch and duration deviants between passive blocks were compared between musicians and nonmusicians. Passive blocks were interleaved with an active discrimination task. In addition to musicians having faster and stronger overall source activation for deviating sounds, source analysis revealed rapid plastic changes in the left and right temporal and left frontal source…

Human brain ages with hierarchy-selective attenuation of prediction errors

Abstract From the perspective of predictive coding, our brain embodies a hierarchical generative model to realize perception, which proactively predicts the statistical structure of sensory inputs. How are these predictive processes modified as we age? Recent research suggested that aging leads to decreased weighting of sensory inputs and increased reliance on predictions. Here we investigated whether this age-related shift from sensorium to predictions occurs at all levels of hierarchical message passing. We recorded the electroencephalography responses with an auditory local–global paradigm in a cohort of 108 healthy participants from 3 groups: seniors, adults, and adolescents. The detect…

Processing of sound rise time in children and adults with and without reading problems

Corrigendum: Both attention and prediction are necessary for adaptive neuronal tuning in sensory processing