Atypical cortical entrainment to speech in the right hemisphere underpins phonemic deficits in dyslexia

Giovanni M Di Liberto; Varghese Peter; Marina Kalashnikova; Usha Goswami; Denis Burnham; Edmund C Lalor

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.03.072

Atypical cortical entrainment to speech in the right hemisphere underpins phonemic deficits in dyslexia

Neuroimage. 2018 Jul 15:175:70-79. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.03.072. Epub 2018 Mar 30.

Authors

Giovanni M Di Liberto¹, Varghese Peter², Marina Kalashnikova³, Usha Goswami⁴, Denis Burnham³, Edmund C Lalor⁵

Affiliations

¹ Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, School of Engineering, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland; Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, UMR 8248, CNRS, France; Département d'Etudes Cognitives, PSL Research University, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. Electronic address: [email protected].
² The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1957, Penrith, Australia; Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia. Electronic address: [email protected].
³ The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1957, Penrith, Australia.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
⁵ Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, School of Engineering, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland; Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA.

PMID: 29609008
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.03.072

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is a multifaceted disorder of learning primarily manifested by difficulties in reading, spelling, and phonological processing. Neural studies suggest that phonological difficulties may reflect impairments in fundamental cortical oscillatory mechanisms. Here we examine cortical mechanisms in children (6-12 years of age) with or without dyslexia (utilising both age- and reading-level-matched controls) using electroencephalography (EEG). EEG data were recorded as participants listened to an audio-story. Novel electrophysiological measures of phonemic processing were derived by quantifying how well the EEG responses tracked phonetic features of speech. Our results provide, for the first time, evidence for impaired low-frequency cortical tracking to phonetic features during natural speech perception in dyslexia. Atypical phonological tracking was focused on the right hemisphere, and correlated with traditional psychometric measures of phonological skills used in diagnostic dyslexia assessments. Accordingly, the novel indices developed here may provide objective metrics to investigate language development and language impairment across languages.

Keywords: Cortical tracking; EEG; Language impairment; Natural speech; Neuromarker; Objective measure.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Child
Dyslexia / physiopathology*
Electroencephalography / methods*
Female
Functional Laterality / physiology*
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
Male
Psycholinguistics*
Speech Perception / physiology*