Consonant duration processing measured in MMN-paradigm in 9-year-old children with and without familial dyslexia
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1
Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Dyslexia, a difficulty in learning to read and write, is thought to result, to a large degree, from problems in phonological processing, i.e., sensitivity for and awareness of speech units, such as syllables and phonemes. According to one view, phonological problems are thought to rely primarily on linguistic level processes. However, phonological problems could also be explained by a deficit in speech perception, for example, problems in the brain’s ability to discriminate between acoustic features crucial for formation of speech sound representations. Here, we studied differences between dyslexic and typically reading children in perception of speech sound duration cues, an important and semantically distinguishing feature in Finnish language.
Participants were 9-year-old children, 14 dyslexic readers with familiar background of dyslexia and 14 typical readers with no familiar risk, participating in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in an MMN-paradigm with an inter-stimulus interval of 610 ms. Stimuli were pseudowords, /ata/ and /atta/, varying only in stop consonant duration. Both stimuli were applied as the standard and deviant stimuli presented with reversed probabilities in two different conditions.
Both groups differed in their responses to the short and long consonants (/ata/ vs. /atta/ and /atta/ vs. /ata/). ERPs to the long /atta/ had two major negative deflections, one to the first syllable /a/ (210-350 ms) and another to the second syllable /tta/ (540-680 ms). The corresponding negative deflections to the short /ata/ (210-350 ms and 350-490 ms) were more merged. Laterality of the difference between responses to the standard-/ata/ and deviant-/ata/ was different between typical and dyslexic readers. This difference was observed predominantly at the right hemisphere in typical readers whereas in dyslexic readers it was observed at the left hemisphere. The groups also differed in the relation between their obligatory and change detection responses to the short deviant-/ata/. In typical readers, the second negative deflection representing the change detection was larger at bilateral frontal and right central areas than the first negative deflection representing obligatory N1/N250, whereas in dyslexic readers the opposite was the case. No corresponding differences were found for the responses to the long /atta/.
These results indicate that dyslexic and typical readers differ in their brain activation reflecting processing of consonant durations both at the level of basic obligatory processing and context dependent change detection.
Conference:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Presentations
Citation:
Tanskanen
A,
Lohvansuu
K,
Hämäläinen
J and
Leppänen
PH
(2009). Consonant duration processing measured in MMN-paradigm in 9-year-old children with and without familial dyslexia.
Conference Abstract:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.136
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Received:
26 Mar 2009;
Published Online:
26 Mar 2009.
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Correspondence:
Annika Tanskanen, Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland, annika.i.tanskanen@jyu.fi