Aberrant Prestimulus Oscillations in Developmental Dyslexia Support an Underlying Attention Shifting Deficit

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Developmental dyslexia (DD) impairs reading and writing acquisition in 5–10% of children, compromising schooling, academic success, and everyday adult life. DD associates with reduced phonological skills, evident from a reduced auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) in the electroencephalogram (EEG). It was argued that such phonological deficits are secondary to an underlying deficit in the shifting of attention to upcoming speech sounds. Here, we tested whether the aberrant MMN in individuals with DD is a function of EEG correlates of prestimulus attention shifting; based on prior findings, we focused prestimulus analyses on alpha-band oscillations. We administered an audio–visual oddball paradigm to school children with and without DD. Children with DD showed EEG markers of deficient attention switching (i.e., increased prestimulus alpha-band intertrial phase coherence [ITPC]) to precede and predict their reduced MMN—aberrantly increased ITPC predicted an aberrantly reduced MMN. In interaction, ITPC and MMN predicted reading abilities, such that poor readers showed both high ITPC and a reduced MMN, the reverse being true in good readers. Prestimulus ITPC may be an overlooked biomarker of deficient attention shifting in DD. The findings support the proposal that an attention shifting deficit underlies phonological deficits in DD, entailing new opportunities for targeted intervention.</jats:p>

Enhanced disengagement of auditory attention and phonological skills in action video gamers

“…A key finding of our study is that the AVG group was significantly faster than the NAVG group at localising an auditory target (Castel et al, 2005;Dye, Green, & Bavelier, 2009), but only when the cue was presented to the opposite side of the target (invalid condition). First, this result is in line with research suggesting that AVG players have faster stimulus-response mappings that lead to the rapid execution of responses to both visual and auditory targets in the environment (Castel et al, 2005;Dye et al, 2009;Green & Bavelier, 2003;Meyer & Schaadt, 2020). Second, it suggests that the AVG players are better at disengaging their auditory attention from the invalid cue location and are more efficient at reallocating attentional resources to a previously uncued position regardless of SOAs.…”

“…In particular, they suggest that auditory attention disengagement may play a fundamental role in reading through both phoneme discrimination -necessary for phonological decoding through graphene-to-phoneme mapping -and phonological short-term memory (Facoetti, Lorusso, Cattaneo, Galli, & Molteni, 2005;Ruffino, Gori, Boccardi, Molteni, & Facoetti, 2014). Supporting this hypothesis, studies have shown a significant link between auditory attentional shifting skills and both phonological processing and reading, using several tasks involving the rapid serial presentation of auditory stimuli, such as attentional blink tasks (Lallier, Donnadieu, Berger, & Valdois, 2010), auditory stream segregation tasks (Lallier et al, 2009;Lallier, Tainturier, et al, 2010), auditory spatial attentional orienting tasks Facoetti et al, 2005Facoetti et al, , 2010, and audio-visual oddball tasks (Meyer & Schaadt, 2020). If reading-related attentional benefits for AVG players are observed in the auditory modality (Green, Pouget, & Bavelier, 2010), this would suggest that the previously reported association between playing AVGs and the enhancement of reading skills is probably not solely mediated by a boost of visual attention skills.…”

Electrophysiological correlates of phonological and temporal regularities in speech processing

“…Indeed, increased theta ITC has been previously associated with an attentional shift in participants hearing their own name (Tamura et al, 2015), and some evidence points toward impaired auditory attentional interference control in dyslexic readers (Gabay et al, 2020), which may render them more susceptible to involuntary attention switching. This differs from recent reports of decreased attentional shifting to upcoming stimuli in dyslexic children in an audiovisual oddball paradigm (Meyer & Schaadt, 2020). However, this study investigated pre-stimulus alpha ITC, and required children to direct their attention toward the visual speech stimuli which preceded the auditory onset, thus highlighting impairments in endogenous attentional control, rather than involuntary attention switches.…”

Multimodal intervention in 8- to 13-year-old French dyslexic readers: Study protocol for a randomized multicenter controlled crossover trial

“…Two very recent studies have shown moderate to strong effects of a rapid automatized naming (RAN) training on reading [40,41]. In addition, some researchers suggest that this deficit in phonological processing is the consequence of a more fundamental deficit in the perceptual and/or attentional processing of auditory information [42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. For example, allophonic perception of speech sounds in subphonemic units can lead to poor discrimination of acoustic differences, a perceptual deficit in phoneme categorization and consequently a deficit in phonological processing.…”