Browsing by Author "Ala-Kurikka, Iina"

Dyslexia affects reading speed and accuracy. Developmental dyslexia is a heritable learning disability related to structural changes in the brain and deficits in sound discrimination. Dyslexia and its’ genetic risk have been studied with auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) from babies to adults. Dyslexia has been associated with changes in the cortical change detection response called the mismatch negativity (MMN). Dyslexic adults and children elicit attenuated MMN responses compared to the control group. The controls’ MMN responses to speech sounds are more pronounced on the left hemisphere than the at-risk group’s responses. Interventions targeting the sound discrimination and phonological awareness have resulted in better reading and writing skills. Rehabilitation is most efficient already before school-age but research on early markers of dyslexia is still insufficient. We studied the relation between inherited dyslexia risk and newborn brain responses by recording ERPs from 38 babies. Half of them were controls. Newborns in the at-risk group had one parent with diagnosed dyslexia. During the ERP recordings we used a speech sound stream consisting of the repetitive pseudoword /ta-ta/. The latter syllable contained infrequent duration, frequency and vowel changes. The sound stream also contained distinct and surprising sounds. We also included a control paradigm to investigate how acoustic variance in the speech sounds affects the brain responses. The speech sound ERPs were small in amplitude. Duration and frequency changes elicited significant MMN responses in both the at-risk and control groups. The strongest MMN response in both groups was due to duration change. The onset of this MMN response seemed to be delayed in the at-risk group. The profiles for standard responses and frequency-MMN responses differed between the groups but these differences didn’t reach statistical significance. Acoustic variance had no effect on the MMN amplitude. Background factors including sex, duration of the pregnancy and birth weight correlated with the response amplitudes. Overall these results show that inherited dyslexia risk contributes to sound discrimination skills soon after birth. Hence studying auditory discrimination interventions at an early age is well-grounded.