Auditory P3a response to native and foreign speech in children with or without attentional deficit.

The aim of this study was to investigate the attentional mechanism in speech processing of native and foreign language in children with and without attentional deficit. For this purpose, the P3a component, cognitive neuromarker of the attentional processes, was investigated in a two-sequence two-deviant oddball paradigm using Finnish and English speech items via event-related potentials (ERP) technique. The difference waves reflected the temporal brain dynamics of the P3a response in native and foreign language contexts.

Discriminatory Brain Processes of Native and Foreign Language in Children with and without Reading Difficulties.

The association between impaired speech perception and reading difficulty has been well established in native language processing, as can be observed from brain activity. However, there has been scarce investigation of whether this association extends to brain activity during foreign language processing. The relationship between reading skills and neuronal speech representation of foreign language remains unclear.

Brain Source Correlates of Speech Perception and Reading Processes in Children With and Without Reading Difficulties.

Neural correlates in reading and speech processing have been addressed extensively in the literature. While reading skills and speech perception have been shown to be associated with each other, their relationship remains debatable. In this study, we investigated reading skills, speech perception, reading, and their correlates with brain source activity in auditory and visual modalities.

Attentional bias towards interpersonal aggression in depression - an eye movement study.

Depressed individuals exhibit an attentional bias towards mood-congruent stimuli, yet evidence for biased processing of threat-related information in human interaction remains scarce. Here, we tested whether an attentional bias towards interpersonally aggressive pictures over interpersonally neutral pictures could be observed to a greater extent in depressed participants than in control participants. Eye movements were recorded while the participants freely viewed visually matched interpersonally aggressive and neutral pictures, which were presented in pairs.

Attentional Processes in Children With Attentional Problems or Reading Difficulties as Revealed Using Brain Event-Related Potentials and Their Source Localization.

Visual attention-related processes include three functional sub-processes: alerting, orienting, and inhibition. We examined these sub-processes using reaction times, event-related potentials (ERPs), and their neuronal source activations during the Attention Network Test (ANT) in control children, attentional problems (AP) children, and reading difficulties (RD) children. During the ANT, electroencephalography was measured using 128 electrodes on three groups of Finnish sixth-graders aged 12-13 years (control = 77; AP = 15; RD = 23).

A co-registration investigation of inter-word spacing and parafoveal preview: Eye movements and fixation-related potentials.

Participants' eye movements (EMs) and EEG signal were simultaneously recorded to examine foveal and parafoveal processing during sentence reading. All the words in the sentence were manipulated for inter-word spacing (intact spaces vs. spaces replaced by a random letter) and parafoveal preview (identical preview vs.

Influence of reading skill and word length on fixation-related brain activity in school-aged children during natural reading.

Word length is one of the main determinants of eye movements during reading and has been shown to influence slow readers more strongly than typical readers. The influence of word length on reading in individuals with different reading skill levels has been shown in separate eye-tracking and electroencephalography studies. However, the influence of reading difficulty on cortical correlates of word length effect during natural reading is unknown.

Attentional processes in typically developing children as revealed using brain event-related potentials and their source localization in Attention Network Test.

Attention-related processes include three functional sub-components: alerting, orienting, and inhibition. We investigated these components using EEG-based, brain event-related potentials and their neuronal source activations during the Attention Network Test in typically developing school-aged children. Participants were asked to detect the swimming direction of the centre fish in a group of five fish.

Semantic anomaly detection in school-aged children during natural sentence reading - A study of fixation-related brain potentials.

In this study, we investigated the effects of context-related semantic anomalies on the fixation-related brain potentials of 12-13-year-old Finnish children in grade 6 during sentence reading. The detection of such anomalies is typically reflected in the N400 event-related potential. We also examined whether the representation invoked by the sentence context extends to the orthographic representation level by replacing the final words of the sentence with an anomalous word neighbour of a plausible word.

Parafoveal previews and lexical frequency in natural reading: Evidence from eye movements and fixation-related potentials.

Participants' eye movements and electroencephalogram (EEG) signal were recorded as they read sentences displayed according to the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. Two target words in each sentence were manipulated for lexical frequency (high vs. low frequency) and parafoveal preview of each target word (identical vs.

Brain event-related potentials to phoneme contrasts and their correlation to reading skills in school-age children.

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the speech processing mechanisms for common and uncommon sound contrasts (/ba/-/da/-/ga/ and /ata/-/at:a/) with respect to the native language of school-age children in Finland and the United States.

On the Eye Movement Control of Changing Reading Direction for a Single Word: The Case of Reading Numerals in Urdu.

Typically orthographies are consistent in terms of reading direction, i.e. from left-to-right or right-to-left.

Somatosensory Brain Function and Gray Matter Regional Volumes Differ According to Exercise History: Evidence from Monozygotic Twins.

Associations between long-term physical activity and cortical function and brain structure are poorly known. Our aim was to assess whether brain functional and/or structural modulation associated with long-term physical activity is detectable using a discordant monozygotic male twin pair design. Nine monozygotic male twin pairs were carefully selected for an intrapair difference in their leisure-time physical activity of at least three years duration (mean age 34 ± 1 years).