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Brain responses to speech sounds and their associations between reading skills in adults with and without childhood dyslexia
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Poster E64 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Aino Sorsa1,2,3, Ariane Tretow1,2, Weiyong Xu1,2, Georgia Gerike1,2,4, Cherie Jenkins1,2, Susannah Otieno-Leppänen1,2,3, Kaisa Lohvansuu1,2, Jarmo Hämäläinen1,2,3, Paavo Leppänen1,2,3; 1University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 2Centre of Interdisciplinary Brain Research (CIBR), Jyväskylä, Finland, 3Centre of Excellence for Learning Dynamics and Intervention Research (InterLearn), Jyväskylä, Finland, 4Niilo Mäki Institute, Jyväskylä, Finland
Introduction. Developmental dyslexia is a difficulty in learning to read despite normal intelligence, educational opportunities and sensory acuity. Deficit in phonological processing is one of the key risk factors associated with developmental dyslexia. Previous studies have also shown deficit in speech sound processing in dyslexia, which could be linked to atypical phonological processing. The neural basis and the development of speech sound processing deficit in developmental dyslexia has been widely studied in childhood, but how it persists into adulthood, remains poorly understood. Here we examined 1.) how persistent the group differences in brain responses to speech sounds are between individuals with and without childhood dyslexia at the age of 26 years, and 2.) the associations between adulthood reading skills as a continuous variable and source level brain activity. Methods. The present study is a part of the Jyväskylä longitudinal study of dyslexia (JLD). Participants were approximately 26 years of age, and they have been involved in JLD since their birth. They have been divided into three groups (research question 1) based on their childhood reading skills at the end of grade 2: reading disabilities and family risk (RDFR, N=15), typical readers and family risk (TRFR, N=34) and typically reading controls (TRC, N=35). We investigated brain responses to bisyllabic pseudowords (/at:a/, /ata/, /ap:a/) presented in an oddball paradigm using event-related potentials/fields in combined electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings. In this poster we report cluster-based permutation statistics to investigate the differences in ERPs at the sensor level between the groups following the same time window as in school age measurements (50-900 ms). The further plan is to investigate the source level brain activity and its association with reading skills in adulthood as a continuous variable. Preliminary results. The ERPs followed the typical time course of auditory responses. Cluster-based permutation statistics comparing the groups did not reveal any significant differences between the groups for standard /at:a/ responses. In contrast, deviant /ata/ responses showed group differences between RDFR and TRFR, and deviant /ap:a/ responses showed group differences between RDFR and both TRFR and TRC. In childhood group comparisons the same tests revealed significant differences for /ata/ between RDFR and the other two groups, while for /at:a/ and /ap:a/ no significant group differences were found. Associations between brain activity and adulthood reading skills will be examined in the next analysis step. Conclusion. Results show that group differences to speech sounds continue in adulthood. However, the result pattern is different from the one observed in childhood. While the group difference was in the same direction at both ages for deviant /ata/, the group difference in adulthood was weaker. In contrast for /ap:a/ the group differences were more robust in adulthood than in childhood. This could be due to extensive exposure to speech sounds that modifies the phonological representations. Alternatively differences in the RDFR sample size between childhood and adulthood could have an effect that needs to be examined further.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, Speech Perception