ERP Indicators of Phonological Awareness Development in Children: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Phonological awareness is the ability to correctly recognize and manipulate phonological structures. The role of phonological awareness in reading development has become evident in behavioral research showing that it is inherently tied to measures of phonological processing and reading ability. This has also been shown with ERP research that examined how phonological processing training can benefit reading skills. However, there have not been many attempts to systematically review how phonological awareness itself is developed neurocognitively. In the present review, we screened 224 papers and systematically reviewed 40 papers that have explored phonological awareness and phonological processing using ERP methodology with both typically developing and children with reading problems. This review highlights ERP components that can be used as neurocognitive predictors of early developmental dyslexia and reading disorders in young children. Additionally, we have presented how phonological processing is developed neurocognitively throughout childhood, as well as which phonological tasks can be used to predict the development of phonological awareness prior to developing reading skills. Neurocognitive measures of early phonological processing can serve as supplemental diagnostic sources to behavioral measures of reading abilities because they show different aspects of phonological sensitivity when compared to behavioral measures.

A Systematic Review over the Effect of Early Infant Diet on Neurodevelopment: Insights from Neuroimaging

“…Syllable discrimination typically occurs between 3 and 6 months of age [ 61 ] and can be detected by analysis of ERPs that are time-locked to a stimulus onset. These ERPs have specific characteristic component waveforms that have been mapped onto how infants process language in early development [ 62 ], with the most relevant being the positive-going P1 component reflecting stimulus detection, the negative-going N2 component reflecting encoding of acoustic features [ 63 ], and the P350 component which is thought to be involved in phoneme priming and occurs in response to an unexpected stimulus [ 64 , 65 ]. The auditory oddball paradigm utilized in these studies audibly presents a frequent standard syllable (such as “pa”) with a less frequent deviant syllable (such as “ba”).…”

Overt Word Reading and Visual Object Naming in Adults with Dyslexia: Electroencephalography Study in Transparent Orthography

“…The present ERP study explored pre-lexical (150-260 ms), lexical (280-700 ms), and post-lexical stages of processing (750-1000 ms) in both overt reading and naming tasks [40,53,54,56,59,83,102,116,117]. The spatial and temporal topographical analysis of ERPs for reading and naming was conducted using parametric statistical methods incorporated in EEGLAB software.…”

“…It used multiple channel selection of ERP plotting format in specified time windows. Reading was explored in a pre-lexical stage in the time window 160-260 ms [21,40,56,84,87], a lexical stage in a time window 450-700 ms [40,56,64,90,117], and a post-lexical stage in time window 750-900 ms [53,91,94,116]. Naming processing was explored in pre-lexical stage 150-200 ms [54,63,96,97], lexical stage 280-440 ms [59,71,72,99,100,117] and post-lexical stage 900-1000 ms [63,83,102,103,116].…”