Unraveling individual differences in learning potential: A dynamic framework for the case of reading development.

Children show an enormous capacity to learn during development, but with large individual differences in the time course and trajectory of learning and the achieved skill level. Recent progress in developmental sciences has shown the contribution of a multitude of factors including genetic variation, brain plasticity, socio-cultural context and learning experiences to individual development. These factors interact in a complex manner, producing children's idiosyncratic and heterogeneous learning paths.

Altered patterns of directed connectivity within the reading network of dyslexic children and their relation to reading dysfluency.

Reading is a complex cognitive skill subserved by a distributed network of visual and language-related regions. Disruptions of connectivity within this network have been associated with developmental dyslexia but their relation to individual differences in the severity of reading problems remains unclear. Here we investigate whether dysfunctional connectivity scales with the level of reading dysfluency by examining EEG recordings during visual word and false font processing in 9-year-old typically reading children (TR) and two groups of dyslexic children: severely dysfluent (SDD) and moderately dysfluent (MDD) dyslexics.

Developmental refinement of cortical systems for speech and voice processing.

Development typically leads to optimized and adaptive neural mechanisms for the processing of voice and speech. In this fMRI study we investigated how this adaptive processing reaches its mature efficiency by examining the effects of task, age and phonological skills on cortical responses to voice and speech in children (8-9years), adolescents (14-15years) and adults. Participants listened to vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/) spoken by different speakers (boy, girl, man) and performed delayed-match-to-sample tasks on vowel and speaker identity.

Development from childhood to adulthood increases morphological and functional inter-individual variability in the right superior temporal cortex.

We study the developmental trajectory of morphology and function of the superior temporal cortex (STC) in children (8-9 years), adolescents (14-15 years) and young adults. We analyze cortical surface landmarks and functional MRI (fMRI) responses to voices, other natural categories and tones and examine how hemispheric asymmetry and inter-subject variability change across age. Our results show stable morphological asymmetries across age groups, including a larger left planum temporale and a deeper right superior temporal sulcus.