Music and reading activities in early childhood associated with improved language development in preterm infants at 2-3 years of age.

Introduction: Children born preterm are at increased risk for adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. Music and reading activities in childhood could ameliorate these difficulties, as they have shown benefits on both neural and behavioral levels. However, only a few studies have assessed these potential benefits in preterm-born children.

Infant neural speech encoding is associated with pre-reading skill development.

Objective: We longitudinally investigated whether infant P1 and N2 ERPs recorded in newborns and at 28 months could predict pre-reading skills at 28 months and 4-5 years.

Methods: We recorded ERPs to a pseudoword in newborns and at 28 months in a sample over-represented by infants with familial dyslexia risk. Using multiple linear regression models, we examined P1 and N2 associations with pre-reading skills at 28 months and 4-5 years.

Infant mismatch responses to speech-sound changes predict language development in preschoolers at risk for dyslexia.

Objective: We investigated how infant mismatch responses (MMRs), which have the potential for providing information on auditory discrimination abilities, could predict subsequent development of pre-reading skills and the risk for familial dyslexia.

Methods: We recorded MMRs to vowel, duration, and frequency deviants in pseudo-words at birth and 28 months in a sample over-represented by infants with dyslexia risk. We examined MMRs' associations with pre-reading skills at 28 months and 4-5 years and compared the results in subgroups with vs.

Beneficial effects of a music listening intervention on neural speech processing in 0-28-month-old children at risk for dyslexia.

Familial risk for developmental dyslexia can compromise auditory and speech processing and subsequent language and literacy development. According to the phonological deficit theory, supporting phonological development during the sensitive infancy period could prevent or ameliorate future dyslexic symptoms. Music is an established method for supporting auditory and speech processing and even language and literacy, but no previous studies have investigated its benefits for infants at risk for developmental language and reading disorders.

Prerequisites of language acquisition in the newborn brain.

Learning to decode and produce speech is one of the most demanding tasks faced by infants. Nevertheless, infants typically utter their first words within a year, and phrases soon follow. Here we review cognitive abilities of newborn infants that promote language acquisition, focusing primarily on studies tapping neural activity.

Structural white matter connectometry of reading and dyslexia.

Current views on the neural network subserving reading and its deficits in dyslexia rely largely on evidence derived from functional neuroimaging studies. However, understanding the structural organization of reading and its aberrations in dyslexia requires a hodological approach, studies of which have not provided consistent findings. Here, we adopted a whole brain hodological approach and investigated relationships between structural white matter connectivity and reading skills and phonological processing in a cross-sectional study of 44 adults using individual local connectome matrix from diffusion MRI data.

Voxel and surface based whole brain analysis shows reading skill associated grey matter abnormalities in dyslexia.

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is the most prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder with a substantial negative influence on the individual's academic achievement and career. Research on its neuroanatomical origins has continued for half a century, yielding, however, inconsistent results, lowered total brain volume being the most consistent finding. We set out to evaluate the grey matter (GM) volume and cortical abnormalities in adult dyslexic individuals, employing a combination of whole-brain voxel- and surface-based morphometry following current recommendations on analysis approaches, coupled with rigorous neuropsychological testing.

Impaired Perception and Neural Processing of Rules in Developmental Dyslexia.

Rules and regularities of language are typically processed in an implicit and effortless way in the human brain. Individuals with developmental dyslexia have problems in implicit learning of regularities in sequential stimuli, but the neural basis of this deficit has not been studied. This study investigated extraction and utilization of a complex auditory rule at neural and perceptual levels in 18 adults with dyslexia and 20 typical readers.

Infant event-related potentials to speech are associated with prelinguistic development.

Neural auditory processing and prelinguistic communication build the foundation for later language development, but how these two are associated is not well known. The current study investigated how neural speech processing is associated with the level and development of prelinguistic skills in 102 infants. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in 6-months-olds to assess the neural detection of a pseudoword (obligatory responses), as well as the neural discrimination of changes in the pseudoword (mismatch responses, MMRs).

An extensive pattern of atypical neural speech-sound discrimination in newborns at risk of dyslexia.

Objective: Identifying early signs of developmental dyslexia, associated with deficient speech-sound processing, is paramount to establish early interventions. We aimed to find early speech-sound processing deficiencies in dyslexia, expecting diminished and atypically lateralized event-related potentials (ERP) and mismatch responses (MMR) in newborns at dyslexia risk.

Methods: ERPs were recorded to a pseudoword and its variants (vowel-duration, vowel-identity, and syllable-frequency changes) from 88 newborns at high or no familial risk.

Can very early music interventions promote at-risk infants' development?

Music and musical activities are often a natural part of parenting. As accumulating evidence shows, music can promote auditory and language development in infancy and early childhood. It may even help to support auditory and language skills in infants whose development is compromised by heritable conditions, like the reading deficit dyslexia, or by environmental factors, such as premature birth.

Newborn infants' auditory system is sensitive to Western music chord categories.

Neural encoding of abstract rules in the audition of newborn infants has been recently demonstrated in several studies using event-related potentials (ERPs). In the present study the neural encoding of Western music chords was investigated in newborn infants. Using ERPs, we examined whether the categorizations of major vs.

The preattentive processing of major vs. minor chords in the human brain: An event-related potential study.

Western music has two classifications that are highly familiar to all Western listeners: the dichotomy between the major and minor modalities and consonance vs. dissonance. We aimed at determining whether these classifications already take place at the level of the elicitation of the change-related mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potential (ERP).