Our study funded by the Fondation Botnar project has recently published findings in the Clinical Neurophysiology Journal.
The prevalent ‘core phonological deficit’ model of dyslexia proposes that the reading and spelling difficulties characterizing affected children stem from prior developmental difficulties in processing speech sound structure, for example perceiving and identifying syllable stress patterns, syllables, rhymes and phonemes. Previous brain imaging studies have highlighted atypical neural patterns of slower rhythmic activity during speech listening in children with dyslexia. Here we investigated both slower and faster neural rhythms while children with dyslexia listened to rhythmic speech. We measured brain rhythms in 51 children (21 typically-developing and 30 with dyslexia). Our analysis focused on the beta-band (a relatively fast rhythm). We found that children with dyslexia did not achieve neural consistency of rhythmic responding in the beta-band, in contrast to typically-developing control children. Additionally, dyslexic children exhibited greater neural beta-band power. These findings suggest that children with dyslexia display atypical neural processing during rhythmic speech for faster brain rhythms as well as slower brain rhythms. Overall, these results contribute to our understanding of the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying rhythmic speech processing in dyslexia.
Read the article here.