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Abnormal low frequency power in cerebellum during rapid speech perception in dyslexia
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Tracy Centanni1,2, Sabrina Carillo1,3, Sara Beach2, Ola Ozernov-Palchik2,4, Sidney May2, Dimitrios Pantazis2, John Gabrieli2; 1University of Florida, 2Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 3Texas Christian University, 4Boston University
Developmental dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with deficits in rapid automatized naming and phonological processing and has lifelong impacts including risk of failure at school and internalizing and externalizing issues, all of which affect an individual’s education, career, and overall mental health. The cerebellum has recently been implicated for its role in language and automaticity in typical readers and is known to play a key role in automaticity: the ability to rapidly associate a stimulus with its meaning. Given that cerebellar anatomical differences have been linked with dyslexia, and one of the most common deficits in dyslexia is rapid automatized naming, a deficit in cerebellar function could explain the lack of automaticity in dyslexia and perhaps processing of rapid stimuli more broadly. In the current study, we investigated cerebellar frequency band power in relation to accuracy during a rapid speech perception task in adults with and without dyslexia to test the hypothesis that reduced power in cerebellar low frequency bands would be associated with lower accuracy in rapid speech perception. Our analyses revealed that reduced power in the lower cerebellar oscillation bands (delta, theta, and alpha) were significantly correlated with performance on the task at the presentation rate where performance began to drop in each group (4 syllables per second for dyslexia and 6 syllables per second in typical readers). Interestingly, the direction of the correlation was opposite across the groups such that less power was associated with worse performance in dyslexia but associated with better performance in typical readers. Our data suggest that cerebellar contributions to rapid speech perception differ between typical readers and those with dyslexia in ways that mimic typical trajectories of neural plasticity for skill acquisition and suggest the dyslexia group may exhibit either an immature development of the cerebellar-cortical network or compensatory activation in the cerebellum. Longitudinal work in children and adolescents is needed to disentangle whether the patterns reported here are due to slower/stalled development of circuits, compensatory plasticity, or some combination of both within or across subgroups. Clinically, this heterogeneity likely contributes to the difference in responder rates to various interventions and an understanding of the cause of this increased cerebellar involvement will inform more customized intervention approaches.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Disorders: Developmental