The relationship between HIV and reading performance for children in Tanzania.

Objective: Children with HIV (CWH) are at increased risk for cognitive and developmental delays, although HIV's influence on reading development remains unclear. Research using internationally validated reading measures with control for factors known to influence literacy outcomes is needed. The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is a tool for assessing students' progress toward reading that has been validated across countries.

Persistent post-concussion symptoms include neural auditory processing in young children.

Aim: Difficulty understanding speech following concussion is likely caused by auditory processing impairments. We hypothesized that concussion disrupts pitch and phonetic processing of a sound, cues in understanding a talker.

Patients & Methods/results: We obtained frequency following responses to a syllable from 120 concussed and 120 control.

Subconcussion revealed by sound processing in the brain.

Introduction/purpose: We tested the hypothesis that an objective measure of auditory processing reveals a history of head trauma that does not meet the clinical definition of concussion.

Methods: Division I collegiate student-athletes ( = 709) across 19 sports were divided into groups, based on their sport, using prevailing classifications of "contact" (317 males, 212 females) and "noncontact" (58 males, 122 females). Participants were evaluated using the frequency-following response (FFR) to speech.

Auditory neural processing in children living with HIV uncovers underlying central nervous system dysfunction.

Objective: Central nervous system (CNS) damage from HIV infection or treatment can lead to developmental delays and poor educational outcomes in children living with HIV (CLWH). Early markers of central nervous system dysfunction are needed to target interventions and prevent life-long disability. The frequency following response (FFR) is an auditory electrophysiology test that can reflect the health of the central nervous system.

Preliteracy assessment in children living with HIV in Tanzania: comparison to results from children living without HIV in Tanzania and the United States.

Objective: Children with HIV (CWH) are at increased risk for cognitive and developmental delays. Whether HIV affects literacy development, however, remains unknown. Rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks offer the simplest preliteracy assessment a child can perform that predicts future reading skills across languages.

Athleticism and sex impact neural processing of sound.

Biology and experience both influence the auditory brain. Sex is one biological factor with pervasive effects on auditory processing. Females process sounds faster and more robustly than males.

Multiple Cases of Auditory Neuropathy Illuminate the Importance of Subcortical Neural Synchrony for Speech-in-noise Recognition and the Frequency-following Response.

Objectives: The role of subcortical synchrony in speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition and the frequency-following response (FFR) was examined in multiple listeners with auditory neuropathy. Although an absent FFR has been documented in one listener with idiopathic neuropathy who has severe difficulty recognizing SIN, several etiologies cause the neuropathy phenotype. Consequently, it is necessary to replicate absent FFRs and concomitant SIN difficulties in patients with multiple sources and clinical presentations of neuropathy to elucidate fully the importance of subcortical neural synchrony for the FFR and SIN recognition.

Non-stimulus-evoked activity as a measure of neural noise in the frequency-following response.

Background: The frequency-following response, or FFR, is a neurophysiologic response that captures distinct aspects of sound processing. Like all evoked responses, FFR is susceptible to electric and myogenic noise contamination during collection. Click-evoked auditory brainstem response collection standards have been adopted for FFR collection, however, whether these standards sufficiently limit FFR noise contamination is unknown.

Rhythm, reading, and sound processing in the brain in preschool children.

A child's success in school relies on their ability to quickly grasp language and reading skills, the foundations of which are acquired even before entering a formal classroom setting. Previous studies in preschoolers have begun to establish relationships linking beat synchronization, preliteracy skills, and auditory processing. Beat synchronization involves the integration of sensorimotor systems with auditory and cognitive circuits and, therefore calls on many of the same neural networks as language.

Clapping in Time With Feedback Relates Pervasively With Other Rhythmic Skills of Adolescents and Young Adults.

Rhythmic expertise is a multidimensional skill set with clusters of distinct rhythmic abilities. For example, the ability to clap in time with feedback relates extensively to distinct beat- and pattern-based rhythmic skills in school-age children. In this study we aimed to determine whether clapping in time would relate to both beat- and pattern- based rhythmic tasks among adolescents and young adults.

Sex differences in subcortical auditory processing only partially explain higher prevalence of language disorders in males.

Males and females differ in their subcortical evoked responses to sound. For many evoked response measures, the sex difference is driven by a faster developmental decline of auditory processing in males. Using the frequency-following response (FFR), an evoked potential that reflects predominately midbrain processing of stimulus features, sex differences were identified in the response to the temporal envelope of speech.

Distinct rhythmic abilities align with phonological awareness and rapid naming in school-age children.

Difficulty in performing rhythmic tasks often co-occurs with literacy difficulties. Motivated by evidence showing that people can vary in their performance across different rhythmic tasks, we asked whether two rhythmic skills identified as distinct in school-age children and young adults would reveal similar or different relationships with two literacy skills known to be important for successful reading development. We addressed our question by focusing on 55 typically developing children (ages 5-8).

The Effectiveness of Interventions for Developmental Dyslexia: Rhythmic Reading Training Compared With Hemisphere-Specific Stimulation and Action Video Games.

Developmental dyslexia is a very common learning disorder causing an impairment in reading ability. Although the core deficit underlying dyslexia is still under debate, significant agreement is reached in the literature that dyslexia is related to a specific deficit in the phonological representation of speech sounds. Many studies also reported an association between reading skills and music.

Auditory Processing Differences in Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Purpose Auditory processing measures have been used in an attempt to understand the relationship between neurological mechanisms and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptomatology in school-age children. The focus of the current study was to understand neural auditory processing in 2- to 3-year-olds with ASD. Method Auditory processing measures (click auditory brainstem responses and speech-evoked frequency-following responses) were hypothesized to differ between typically developing children ( = 18) and children with ASD ( = 18).

Play Sports for a Quieter Brain: Evidence From Division I Collegiate Athletes.

Background: Playing sports has many benefits, including boosting physical, cardiovascular, and mental fitness. We tested whether athletic benefits extend to sensory processing-specifically auditory processing-as measured by the frequency-following response (FFR), a scalp-recorded electrophysiological potential that captures neural activity predominately from the auditory midbrain to complex sounds.

Hypothesis: Given that FFR amplitude is sensitive to experience, with enrichment enhancing FFRs and injury reducing them, we hypothesized that playing sports is a form of enrichment that results in greater FFR amplitude.

Stable auditory processing underlies phonological awareness in typically developing preschoolers.

Sound processing is an important scaffold for early language acquisition. Here we investigate its relationship to three components of phonological processing in young children (∼age 3): Phonological Awareness (PA), Phonological Memory (PM), and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN). While PA is believed to hinge upon consistency of sound processing to distinguish and manipulate word features, PM relies on an internal store of the sounds of language and RAN relies on fluid production of those sounds.

Sex differences in subcortical auditory processing emerge across development.

Human subcortical auditory processing is sexually dimorphic. The prevailing view - that sex differences arise from cochlear differences - remains unproven, and the extent to which these differences reflect distinct auditory processes is unknown. To determine the origin of subcortical sex differences, we mapped their emergence onto the peripheral-to-central maturation of the auditory system in 516 participants (250 female) across three age groups: 3-5, 14-15, and 22-26 years.

How Rhythmic Skills Relate and Develop in School-Age Children.

Rhythmic expertise can be considered a multidimensional skill set, with clusters of distinct rhythmic abilities evident in young adults. In this article, we explore relationships in school-age children (ages 5-8 years) among 4 rhythmic tasks hypothesized to reflect different clusters of skills, namely, drumming to an isochronous beat, remembering rhythmic patterns, drumming to the beat in music, and clapping in time with feedback. We find that drumming to an isochronous beat and remembering rhythmic patterns are not related.

Clapping in time parallels literacy and calls upon overlapping neural mechanisms in early readers.

The auditory system is extremely precise in processing the temporal information of perceptual events and using these cues to coordinate action. Synchronizing movement to a steady beat relies on this bidirectional connection between sensory and motor systems, and activates many of the auditory and cognitive processes used when reading. Here, we use Interactive Metronome, a clinical intervention technology requiring an individual to clap her hands in time with a steady beat, to investigate whether the links between literacy and synchronization skills, previously established in older children, are also evident in children who are learning to read.

Improving reading skills in students with dyslexia: the efficacy of a sublexical training with rhythmic background.

The core deficit underlying developmental dyslexia (DD) has been identified in difficulties in dynamic and rapidly changing auditory information processing, which contribute to the development of impaired phonological representations for words. It has been argued that enhancing basic musical rhythm perception skills in children with DD may have a positive effect on reading abilities because music and language share common mechanisms and thus transfer effects from the former to the latter are expected to occur. A computer-assisted training, called Rhythmic Reading Training (RRT), was designed in which reading exercises are combined with rhythm background.