Amplitude rise time sensitivity in children with and without dyslexia: differential task effects and longitudinal relations to phonology and literacy.

The speech amplitude envelope carries important acoustic information required for speech intelligibility and contains sensory cues (amplitude rise times, ARTs) that play a key role in both sensory rhythm perception and neural speech encoding. Individual differences in children's sensitivity to ARTs have been related to the development of children's phonological processing skills across languages by the Temporal Sampling theory. Impaired processing of ARTs also characterises children with dyslexia.

Atypical low-frequency cortical encoding of speech identifies children with developmental dyslexia.

Slow cortical oscillations play a crucial role in processing the speech amplitude envelope, which is perceived atypically by children with developmental dyslexia. Here we use electroencephalography (EEG) recorded during natural speech listening to identify neural processing patterns involving slow oscillations that may characterize children with dyslexia. In a story listening paradigm, we find that atypical power dynamics and phase-amplitude coupling between delta and theta oscillations characterize dyslexic versus other child control groups (typically-developing controls, other language disorder controls).

Atypical beta-band effects in children with dyslexia in response to rhythmic audio-visual speech.

Objective: Previous studies have reported atypical delta phase in children with dyslexia, and that delta phase modulates the amplitude of the beta-band response via delta-beta phase-amplitude coupling (PAC). Accordingly, the atypical delta-band effects in children with dyslexia may imply related atypical beta-band effects, particularly regarding delta-beta PAC. Our primary objective was to explore beta-band oscillations in children with and without dyslexia, to explore potentially atypical effects in the beta band in dyslexic children.

Neural responses to natural and enhanced speech edges in children with and without dyslexia.

Sensory-neural studies indicate that children with developmental dyslexia show impairments in processing acoustic speech envelope information. Prior studies suggest that this arises in part from reduced sensory sensitivity to amplitude rise times (ARTs or speech "edges") in the envelope, accompanied by less accurate neural encoding of low-frequency envelope information. Accordingly, enhancing these characteristics of the speech envelope may enhance neural speech processing in children with dyslexia.

Atypical speech production of multisyllabic words and phrases by children with developmental dyslexia.

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. Yet spoken word production appears normal. This suggests an unexpected disconnect between speech input and speech output processes.

Decoding of speech information using EEG in children with dyslexia: Less accurate low-frequency representations of speech, not "Noisy" representations.

The amplitude envelope of speech carries crucial low-frequency acoustic information that assists linguistic decoding. The sensory-neural Temporal Sampling (TS) theory of developmental dyslexia proposes atypical encoding of speech envelope information < 10 Hz, leading to atypical phonological representations. Here a backward linear TRF model and story listening were employed to estimate the speech information encoded in the electroencephalogram in the canonical delta, theta and alpha bands by 9-year-old children with and without dyslexia.

Atypical delta-band phase consistency and atypical preferred phase in children with dyslexia during neural entrainment to rhythmic audio-visual speech.

According to the sensory-neural Temporal Sampling theory of developmental dyslexia, neural sampling of auditory information at slow rates (<10 Hz, related to speech rhythm) is atypical in dyslexic individuals, particularly in the delta band (0.5-4 Hz). Here we examine the underlying neural mechanisms related to atypical sampling using a simple repetitive speech paradigm.

Neural sampling of the speech signal at different timescales by children with dyslexia.

Phonological difficulties characterize individuals with dyslexia across languages. Currently debated is whether these difficulties arise from atypical neural sampling of (or entrainment to) auditory information in speech at slow rates (<10 Hz, related to speech rhythm), faster rates, or neither. MEG studies with adults suggest that atypical sampling in dyslexia affects faster modulations in the neurophysiological gamma band, related to phoneme-level representation.

Development of binaural temporal fine structure sensitivity in children.

The highest frequency for which the temporal fine structure (TFS) of a sinewave can be compared across ears varies between listeners with an upper limit of about 1400 Hz for young normal-hearing adults (YNHA). In this study, binaural TFS sensitivity was investigated for 63 typically developing children, aged 5 years, 6 months to 9 years, 4 months using the temporal fine structure-adaptive frequency (TFS-AF) test of Füllgrabe, Harland, Sęk, and Moore [Int. J.