Children with dyslexia show a reduced processing benefit from bimodal speech information compared to their typically developing peers.

During information processing, individuals benefit from bimodally presented input, as has been demonstrated for speech perception (i.e., printed letters and speech sounds) or the perception of emotional expressions (i.

Facial speech gestures: the relation between visual speech processing, phonological awareness, and developmental dyslexia in 10-year-olds.

Successful communication in everyday life crucially involves the processing of auditory and visual components of speech. Viewing our interlocutor and processing visual components of speech facilitates speech processing by triggering auditory processing. Auditory phoneme processing, analyzed by event-related brain potentials (ERP), has been shown to be associated with impairments in reading and spelling (i.

Present and past: Can writing abilities in school children be associated with their auditory discrimination capacities in infancy?

Literacy acquisition is highly associated with auditory processing abilities, such as auditory discrimination. The event-related potential Mismatch Response (MMR) is an indicator for cortical auditory discrimination abilities and it has been found to be reduced in individuals with reading and writing impairments and also in infants at risk for these impairments. The goal of the present study was to analyze the relationship between auditory speech discrimination in infancy and writing abilities at school age within subjects, and to determine when auditory speech discrimination differences, relevant for later writing abilities, start to develop.

Auditory phoneme discrimination in illiterates: mismatch negativity--a question of literacy?

These days, illiteracy is still a major problem. There is empirical evidence that auditory phoneme discrimination is one of the factors contributing to written language acquisition. The current study investigated auditory phoneme discrimination in participants who did not acquire written language sufficiently.

Impact of phonological processing skills on written language acquisition in illiterate adults.

Illiteracy remains a world-wide problem not only for children but also for adults. Phonological processing has been defined as a crucial factor for the acquisition of written language, which usually occurs in childhood. However, it is unclear to what extent phonological processing is necessary in order for adults to acquire written language skills.

Context- and prosody-driven ERP markers for dialog focus perception in children.

The development of language proficiency extends late into childhood and includes not only producing or comprehending sounds, words and sentences, but likewise larger utterances spanning beyond sentence borders like dialogs. Dialogs consist of information units whose value constantly varies within a verbal exchange. While information is focused when introduced for the first time or corrected in order to alter the knowledge state of communication partners, the same information turns into shared knowledge during the further course of a verbal exchange.

In the eye of the listener: pupil dilation elucidates discourse processing.

The current study investigated cognitive resource allocation in discourse processing by means of pupil dilation and behavioral measures. Short question-answer dialogs were presented to listeners. Either the context question queried a new information focus in the successive answer, or else the context query was corrected in the answer sentence (correction information).

Sex hormone testosterone affects language organization in the infant brain.

Using a phonological discrimination paradigm, we show that the brain responses of 4-week-old infants systematically vary as a function of biological sex and testosterone level. Females who are generally low on testosterone demonstrated a clear phonological discrimination effect with a bilateral distribution. In male infants this effect systematically varied as a function of testosterone level.

Catching the news: Processing strategies in listening to dialogs as measured by ERPs.

Background: The online segmentation of spoken single sentences has repeatedly been associated with a particular event-related brain potential. The brain response could be attributed to the perception of major prosodic boundaries, and was termed Closure Positive Shift (CPS). However, verbal exchange between humans is mostly realized in the form of cooperative dialogs instead of loose strings of single sentences.

Prosodic processing at the sentence level in infants.

We investigate whether 8-month-old infants can detect prosodic cues relevant in sentence structuring. We recorded event-related potentials to examine online responses to the processing of prosodic boundaries. Prior studies in adults have validated the closure positive shift as reflecting prosodic boundary perception during speech processing.

Prosody-driven sentence processing: an event-related brain potential study.

Four experiments systematically investigating the brain's response to the perception of sentences containing differing amounts of linguistic information are presented. Spoken language generally provides various levels of information for the interpretation of the incoming speech stream. Here, we focus on the processing of prosodic phrasing, especially on its interplay with phonemic, semantic, and syntactic information.