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Poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia

Whereas natural acoustic variation in speech does not compromise phoneme discrimination in healthy adults, it was hypothesized to be a challenge for developmental dyslexics. We investigated dyslexics’ neural and perceptual discrimination of native language phonemes during acoustic variation. Dyslexi...

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Autores principales: Virtala, P., Talola, S., Partanen, E., Kujala, T.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7250843/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32457322
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-65490-3
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author Virtala, P.
Talola, S.
Partanen, E.
Kujala, T.
author_facet Virtala, P.
Talola, S.
Partanen, E.
Kujala, T.
author_sort Virtala, P.
collection PubMed
description Whereas natural acoustic variation in speech does not compromise phoneme discrimination in healthy adults, it was hypothesized to be a challenge for developmental dyslexics. We investigated dyslexics’ neural and perceptual discrimination of native language phonemes during acoustic variation. Dyslexics and non-dyslexics heard /æ/ and /i/ phonemes in a context with f(o) variation and then in a context without it. Mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a responses to phoneme changes were recorded with electroencephalogram to compare groups during ignore and attentive listening. Perceptual phoneme discrimination in the variable context was evaluated with hit-ratios and reaction times. MMN/N2bs were diminished in dyslexics in the variable context. Hit-ratios were smaller in dyslexics than controls. MMNs did not differ between groups in the context without variation. These results suggest that even distinctive vowels are challenging to discriminate for dyslexics when the context resembles natural variability of speech. This most likely reflects poor categorical perception of phonemes in dyslexics. Difficulties to detect linguistically relevant invariant information during acoustic variation in speech may contribute to dyslexics’ deficits in forming native language phoneme representations during infancy. Future studies should acknowledge that simple experimental paradigms with repetitive stimuli can be insensitive to dyslexics’ speech processing deficits.
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spelling pubmed-72508432020-06-04 Poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia Virtala, P. Talola, S. Partanen, E. Kujala, T. Sci Rep Article Whereas natural acoustic variation in speech does not compromise phoneme discrimination in healthy adults, it was hypothesized to be a challenge for developmental dyslexics. We investigated dyslexics’ neural and perceptual discrimination of native language phonemes during acoustic variation. Dyslexics and non-dyslexics heard /æ/ and /i/ phonemes in a context with f(o) variation and then in a context without it. Mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a responses to phoneme changes were recorded with electroencephalogram to compare groups during ignore and attentive listening. Perceptual phoneme discrimination in the variable context was evaluated with hit-ratios and reaction times. MMN/N2bs were diminished in dyslexics in the variable context. Hit-ratios were smaller in dyslexics than controls. MMNs did not differ between groups in the context without variation. These results suggest that even distinctive vowels are challenging to discriminate for dyslexics when the context resembles natural variability of speech. This most likely reflects poor categorical perception of phonemes in dyslexics. Difficulties to detect linguistically relevant invariant information during acoustic variation in speech may contribute to dyslexics’ deficits in forming native language phoneme representations during infancy. Future studies should acknowledge that simple experimental paradigms with repetitive stimuli can be insensitive to dyslexics’ speech processing deficits. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-05-26 /pmc/articles/PMC7250843/ /pubmed/32457322 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-65490-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Virtala, P.
Talola, S.
Partanen, E.
Kujala, T.
Poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia
title Poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia
title_full Poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia
title_fullStr Poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia
title_full_unstemmed Poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia
title_short Poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia
title_sort poor neural and perceptual phoneme discrimination during acoustic variation in dyslexia
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7250843/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32457322
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-65490-3
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