Trent Consultants News New Brain Findings On Dyslexic Children

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Their study appears in the Nov. 12 issue of Neuron . Recent scientific studies suggest that childrenwith developmental dyslexia -- a neurological disorder affecting reading andspelling skills in 5 to 10 percent of school aged children -- have difficultiesseparating relevant auditory information from competing noise. The research from Northwestern University'sAuditory Neuroscience Laboratory not only confirms those findings but presentsbiological evidence that children who report problems hearing speech in noisealso suffer from a measurable neural impairment that adversely affects theirability to make use of regularities in the sound environment. "The ability to sharpen or fine-tune repeatingelements is crucial to hearing speech in noise because it allows for superior'tagging' of voice pitch, an important cue in picking out a particular voicewithin background noise," said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor ofCommunication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of the AuditoryNeuroscience Laboratory. In the article "Context-dependent encoding inthe human auditory brainstem relates to hearing speech-in-noise: Implicationsfor developmental dyslexia," Kraus and co-investigators BharathChandrasekaran, Jane Hornickel, Erika Skoe and Trent Nicol demonstrate that theremarkable ability of the brain to tune into relevant aspects in the soundscapeis carried out by an adaptive auditory system that continuously changes itsactivity based on the demands of context. Good and poor readers were asked to watch a videowhile the speech sound "da" was presented to them through an earphonein two different sessions during which the brain's response to these sounds wascontinuously measured. In the first session, "da" was repeatedover and over and over again (in what the researchers call a repetitivecontext). In the second, "da" was presented randomly amid otherspeech sounds (in what the researchers call a variable context). In anadditional session, the researchers performed behavioral tests in which thechildren were asked to repeat sentences that were presented to them amidincreasing degrees of noise. "Even though the children's attention wasfocused on a movie, the auditory system of the good readers 'tuned in' to therepeatedly presented speech sound context and sharpened the sound's encoding.In contrast, poor readers did not show an improvement in encoding withrepetition," said Chandrasekaran, lead author of the study. "We alsofound that children who had an adaptive auditory system performed better on thebehavioral tests that required them to perceive speech in noisybackgrounds." The study suggests that in addition to conventionalreading and spelling based interventions, poor readers who have difficultiesprocessing information in noisy backgrounds could benefit from the employmentof relatively simple strategies, such as placing the child in front of theteacher or using wireless technologies to enhance the sound of a teacher'svoice for an individual student. Interestingly, the researchers found that dyslexicchildren showed enhanced brain activity in the variable condition. This mayenable dyslexic children to represent their sensory environment in a broaderand arguably more creative manner, although at the cost of the ability toexclude irrelevant signals (e.g. noise). "The study brings us closer to understandingsensory processing in children who experience difficulty excluding irrelevantnoise. It provides an objective index that can help in the assessment ofchildren with reading problems," Kraus says. For nearly two decades, Kraus hasbeen trying to determine why some children with good hearing have difficultieslearning to read and spell while others do not. Early in her work, because thedeficits she was exploring related to the complex processes of reading andwriting, Kraus studied how the cortex -- the part of the brain responsible forthinking --encoded sounds. She and her colleagues now understand that problemsassociated with the encoding of sound also can occur in lower perceptualstructures. Adapted from materials provided by NorthwesternUniversity , a service of AAAS . <http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/11/091111123600.htm>.   Trent Consultants News: Trent ConsultantsPsychology Clinic. Dedicated to the study, diagnosis, and treatment of mental,emotional and behavioral disorders. Trent Consultants has a variety of programsfor parents who want to give their children a headstart in life. TrentConsultants website www.trentconsultants.org Email: childcare@trentconsultants.org

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