title: Infant ERPs separate children at risk of dyslexia who become good readers from those who become poor readers.
abstract: Dyslexia is heritable and associated with phonological processing deficits that can be reflected in the event-related potentials (ERPs). Here, we recorded ERPs from 2-month-old infants at risk of dyslexia and from a control group to investigate whether their auditory system processes /bAk/ and /dAk/ changes differently. The speech sounds were presented in an oddball paradigm. The children were followed longitudinally and performed a word reading fluency test in second grade. The infant ERPs were subsequently analyzed according to high or low reading fluency in order to find a neurophysiological precursor of poor reading fluency. The results show that the fluent reading children (from both the at-risk and the control group) processed the speech sound changes differentially in infancy as indicated by a mismatch response (MMR). In the control group the MMR was frontally positive and in the fluent at-risk group the MMR was parietally positive. The non-fluent at-risk group did not show an MMR. We conclude that at-risk children who became fluent readers were better at speech processing in infancy than those who became non-fluent readers. This indicates a very early speech processing deficit in the group of later non-fluent readers.
authors.affiliation: Department of Child Development and Education, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. T.L.vanzuijen@uva.nl
authors.forename: Titia L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: van Zuijen
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Plakas
authors.forename: Ben A M
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Maassen
authors.forename: Natasha M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Maurits
authors.forename: Aryan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: van der Leij
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001931:Brain Mapping; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007361:Intelligence Tests; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology