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The influence of rhythm on neurophysiological processing of phonology: A study of adults with dyslexia
Poster Session F, Friday, October 2, 2:45 - 4:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Sanna Kraft1, Tamara Rathcke2, Annika Andersson1; 1Linnaeus university, 2University of Konstanz
Dyslexia is a learning disorder characterized by specific difficulties in learning to read accurately and fluently. It has generally been explained in terms of phonological deficits in the form of deficient processing of consonant and vowels (Pagliarini et al., 2020). In addition, a domain-general deficit of temporal information processing contributes to the explanation of these types of challenges in language (Wolff, 2002). For instance, a study of 7–17-year-olds showed a positive relationship between temporal processing and language processing indicating that better performance on a rhythm task was related with higher scores on a grammar test (Lee et al., 2020). Previous investigations have focused on the relationship between rhythmic abilities and syntactic or grammatical proficiencies in children and adults with and without dyslexia. For instance, Pagliarini et al. (2020) tested children’s and adults’ anticipatory ability after being exposed to regular and irregular rhythm. There were no group differences after exposure to irregular rhythm. However, after exposure to regular rhythm, greater timing errors in anticipations were restricted to children and adults with dyslexia, suggesting that they could not easily exploit temporal regularities to anticipate the next sensory event, such as a specific word in a sentence. Another study investigated if rhythmic stimulation (priming) can orient attentional resources to temporal structures in language and thus affect processing of syntax (Canette et al., 2019). They reported higher sensitivity to grammatical errors following regular rhythmic primes in comparison to irregular rhythmic primes. Similar positive effects of rhythm have been reported on 5–8-year olds’ performance on spoken grammar tasks (Chern et al., 2018). To investigate the effects of rhythm on neural processing of grammatical errors, event-related potentials (ERPs) have been utilized. In a recent study, both dyslexic adults and their matched controls showed an enhanced P600 to ungrammatical sentences in comparison to grammatical sentences, as expected (Canette et al., 2020). More importantly, the P600 when primed with regular rhythm was reduced for grammatical sentences and enhanced for ungrammatical sentences in comparison to when primed with irregular rhythm. Thus, a positive effect of regular rhythm indicating ease of processing. Interestingly, while dyslexia has been connected to deficits in both phonological processing and rhythm, no studies, to our knowledge, have examined processing of phonology as measured by ERPs to rhyming primed with rhythm. Therefore, we will investigate phonological processing as affected by rhythm that either aligns (regular rhythm) or does not align (irregular rhythm) with presented rhyming or non-rhyming pseudo-word pairs. More specifically, we will investigate if priming with regular or irregular rhythm affect the amplitude of the rhyming effect (N450) in 30 adults with dyslexia and 30 adults without dyslexia. Results from this project could gain insights into the core deficits in dyslexia and show the importance of integrating rhythmic priming to interventions targeting adults and children with dyslexia.
Topic Areas: Phonology, Disorders: Developmental