Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-7988, USA.
Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-7988, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Jan 21;19(3):1180. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19031180.
Research on children and adults with developmental dyslexia-a specific difficulty in learning to read and spell-suggests that phonological deficits in dyslexia are linked to basic auditory deficits in temporal sampling. However, it remains undetermined whether such deficits are already present in infancy, especially during the sensitive period when the auditory system specializes in native phoneme perception. Because dyslexia is strongly hereditary, it is possible to examine infants for early predictors of the condition before detectable symptoms emerge. This study examines low-level auditory temporal sampling in infants at risk for dyslexia across the sensitive period of native phoneme learning. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we found deficient auditory sampling at theta in at-risk infants at both 6 and 12 months, indicating atypical auditory sampling at the syllabic rate in those infants across the sensitive period for native-language phoneme learning. This interpretation is supported by our additional finding that auditory sampling at theta predicted later vocabulary comprehension, nonlinguistic communication and the ability to combine words. Our results indicate a possible early marker of risk for dyslexia.
对儿童和成人发展性阅读障碍（一种特定的阅读和拼写学习困难）的研究表明，阅读障碍中的语音缺陷与时间采样的基本听觉缺陷有关。然而，目前尚不确定这种缺陷是否在婴儿期就已经存在，特别是在听觉系统专门用于母语语音感知的敏感时期。由于阅读障碍具有很强的遗传性，因此有可能在可检测到症状出现之前，对有患病风险的婴儿进行早期预测。本研究在母语语音学习的敏感时期，对有阅读障碍风险的婴儿进行了低频听觉时间采样测试。使用脑磁图（MEG），我们发现，在 6 个月和 12 个月时，有患病风险的婴儿在θ频段的听觉采样能力不足，这表明在母语语音学习的敏感时期，这些婴儿的音节率的听觉采样存在异常。这一解释得到了我们的额外发现的支持，即θ频段的听觉采样能力可以预测以后的词汇理解、非语言交流和组合单词的能力。我们的研究结果表明，这可能是阅读障碍风险的一个早期标志物。
