Search results for "phoneme"

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

2019

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…

Learning-induced neural plasticity of speech processing before birth

2013

Learning, the foundation of adaptive and intelligent behavior, is based on plastic changes in neural assemblies, reflected by the modulation of electric brain responses. In infancy, auditory learning implicates the formation and strengthening of neural long-term memory traces, improving discrimination skills, in particular those forming the prerequisites for speech perception and understanding. Although previous behavioral observations show that newborns react differentially to unfamiliar sounds vs. familiar sound material that they were exposed to as fetuses, the neural basis of fetal learning has not thus far been investigated. Here we demonstrate direct neural correlates of human fetal l…

GraphoLearn India : The Effectiveness of a Computer-Assisted Reading Intervention in Supporting Struggling Readers of English

2018

India, a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion individuals, houses the world’s second largest educational system. Despite this, 100 of millions of individuals in India are still illiterate. As English medium education sweeps the country, many are forced to learn in a language which is foreign to them. Those living in poverty further struggle to learn English as it tends to be a language which they have no prior exposure to and no support at home for. Low-quality schools and poor instructional methods further exacerbate the problem. Without access to quality education, these individuals continue to struggle and are ultimately never given the chance to break the cycle of poverty.…

Electrophysiological and hemodynamic mismatch responses in rats listening to human speech syllables

2016

International audience; Speech is a complex auditory stimulus which is processed according to several time-scales. Whereas consonant discrimination is required to resolve rapid acoustic events, voice perception relies on slower cues. Humans, right from preterm ages, are particularly efficient to encode temporal cues. To compare the capacities of preterms to those observed in other mammals, we tested anesthetized adult rats by using exactly the same paradigm as that used in preterm neonates. We simultaneously recorded neural (using ECoG) and hemodynamic responses (using fNIRS) to series of human speech syllables and investigated the brain response to a change of consonant (ba vs. ga) and to …

Costs and Benefits of Orthographic Inconsistency in Reading: Evidence from a Cross-Linguistic Comparison.

2016

We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, …

Phoneme processing skills are reflected in children's MMN responses.

2017

Phonological awareness (PA), the core contributor in phoneme processing abilities, has a link to later reading skills in children. However, the associations between PA and neural auditory discrimination are not clear. We used event-related potential (ERP) methodology and neuropsychological testing to monitor the neurocognitive basis of phonological awareness in typically developing children. We measured 5–6-year-old children's (N=70) phoneme processing, word completion and perceptual reasoning skills and compared their test results to their brain responses to phonemic changes, separately for each test. We found that children performing better in Phoneme processing test showed larger mismatc…

GraphoGame SI: the development of a technology-enhanced literacy learning tool for Standard Indonesian

2018

Early intervention programs are generally considered the most efficient and beneficial approach to providing support to struggling beginning readers. This paper discusses the theoretical background, development, and design of, as well as the first results obtained with, GraphoGame for Standard Indonesian, a technology-enhanced learning environment that trains the basic skills of reading by high but playful exposure to grapheme-phoneme coupling. The results of the pilot study assessing the usability of the program in 69 first-graders show that the more the students with low pre-test phonological skills were exposed to the game, the better their post-test performance on reading and decoding f…

Cracking the Code : The Impact of Orthographic Transparency and Morphological-Syllabic Complexity on Reading and Developmental Dyslexia

2019

Reading is an essential skill in modern societies, yet not all learners necessarily become proficient readers. Theoretical concepts (e.g., the orthographic depth hypothesis; the grain size theory) as well as empirical evidence suggest that certain orthographies are easier to learn than others. The present paper reviews the literature on orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity of alphabetic languages. These notions are elaborated to show that differences in reading acquisition reflect fundamental differences in the nature of the phonological recoding and reading strategies developing in response to the specific orthography to be learned. The present paper…

Auditiivisen ja kielellisen harjoittelun vaikutus kolmannella luokalla olevien heikkojen lukijoiden lukutaitoon

2012

Detrimental noise effects on brain's speech functions.

2009

Background noise has become part of our everyday life in modern societies. Its presence affects both the ability to concentrate and communicate. Some individuals, like children, the elderly, and non-native speakers have pronounced problems in noisy environments. Here we review evidence suggesting that background noise has both transient and Sustained detrimental effects on central speech processing. Studies on the effects of noise on neural processes have demonstrated hemispheric reorganization in speech processing in adult individuals during background noise. During noise, the well-known left hemisphere dominance in speech discrimination became right hemisphere preponderant. Furthermore, l…