The dyslexia oscillome: Development of auditory and visual neural processing in children from age 3 at risk for dyslexia

Dyslexia is one of the most prevalent developmental disorders, estimated to affect up to 7% of the population. To date, dyslexia is usually diagnosed in second grade or later, when reading and/or spelling difficulties demonstrate to be severe and persistent. Despite remedial interventions provided after diagnosis, literacy problems often continue into adulthood, resulting in a life-long experience with reading failure. To allow for preventive as well as more effective interventions, an earlier identification of children at risk for dyslexia is needed. Therefore, several decades of research have strived to identify the causal factors underlying dyslexia. 

The aim of this project is to investigate the novel hypothesis that neural oscillatory mechanisms in auditory and visual modalities play a foundational role in oral and written language development. In both modalities, theoretical frameworks have described two neural timescales, i.e., delta-theta and beta-gamma oscillations, sustaining the temporal encoding of phonological and orthographical information. There is accumulating evidence supporting this hypothesis in experienced readers, at least with regard to the auditory modality, but information is lacking on whether and how auditory and/or visual oscillatory mechanisms influence early language acquisition. By longitudinally investigating behavioral and neural measures in a unique sample of pre-reading children, this project will shed new light on the cause(s) of dyslexia.