title: Brain responses to changes in speech sound durations differ between infants with and without familial risk for dyslexia.
abstract: A specific learning disability, developmental dyslexia, is a language-based disorder that is shown to be strongly familial. Therefore, infants born to families with a history of the disorder are at an elevated risk for the disorder. However, little is known of the potential early markers of dyslexia. Here we report differences between 6-month-old infants with and without high risk of familial dyslexia in brain electrical activation generated by changes in the temporal structure of speech sounds, a critical cueing feature in speech. We measured event-related brain responses to consonant duration changes embedded in ata pseudowords applying an oddball paradigm, in which pseudoword tokens with varying /t/ duration were presented as frequent standard (80%) or as rare deviant stimuli (each 10%) with an interval of 610 msec between the stimuli. The infants at risk differ from control infants in both their initial responsiveness to sounds per se and in their change-detection responses dependent on the stimulus context. These results show that infants at risk due to a familial background of reading problems process auditory temporal cues of speech sounds differently from infants without such a risk even before they learn to speak.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. paavo.leppanen@psyka.jyu.fi
authors.forename: Paavo H T
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: Leppänen
authors.forename: Ulla
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Richardson
authors.forename: Elina
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pihko
authors.forename: Kenneth M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Eklund
authors.forename: Tomi K
authors.initials: TK
authors.lastname: Guttorm
authors.forename: Mikko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Aro
authors.forename: Heikki
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lyytinen
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000235:genetics* / Q000503:physiopathology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D005260:Female; D020022:Genetic Predisposition to Disease; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*