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Effect of musical training on neural processing of pitch and rhythm in young adults with dyslexia
Poster Session B, Friday, September 12, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Tracy M Centanni1,2, Delaney Kelemen1,2, Omar Rodriguez1, Camden Burnsworth2, Andrea R Halpern3, Michael J Wenger4; 1University of Florida, 2Texas Christian University, 3Bucknell University, 4University of Oklahoma
The ability to create and evaluate expectations of upcoming events is a critical brain function that serves a variety of skills, including music, language, and reading. In language and reading, such predictions support rapid processing of input that must be integrated and understood quickly. In music, predictions support perception of rhythms in the context of a known time signature as well as perception of minor keys. Adolescents who self-report increased skill in sight reading music score significantly higher on passage comprehension, suggesting a possible link between prediction of upcoming notes and prediction of upcoming text. Research suggests that people with dyslexia exhibit a significant relationship between the degree of reading deficit and level of musical skill. For example, children with dyslexia exhibit deficits in both rhythm perception, beat synchronization, and in perceiving rise times (the rapid acoustic changes at the beginning of speech sounds). Given the growing body of work reporting significant relationships between music skills and reading ability, there are likely shared neural mechanisms subserving both music and reading, specifically those related to expectation. Given some recent discussion about a cerebellar deficit in dyslexia, and the cerebellum’s role in expectation, the poor rhythm abilities observed in dyslexia could be due to a deficit in prediction. The present study was designed to evaluate whether musical training is associated with improved expectation for pitch and/or rhythm in those with dyslexia. Young adults with and without dyslexia completed two tasks while wearing a 256-channel high density EEG net (MagStim/EGI). The first task is a published mode perception task in which participants listen to a single line melody and will indicate whether the melody was in a major or minor key. The second is a validated rhythm perception task in which participants listen to a rhythm and indicate whether a target beat was regular or irregular in the context of that rhythm. Following pre-processing, ERP data were analyzed for the P3a and P3b components during unexpected events compared to the expected events. While data collection and analysis are ongoing at the time of abstract submission, our current data suggest that musical training is associated with the expected P3 to the minor critical note in both groups but was surprisingly also present in nonmusicians with dyslexia. In the context of rhythm, musical training seems to have a similar influence on neural responses to unexpected beats in typical readers and those with dyslexia. Those with dyslexia did, however, exhibit increased P3 in the frontal lobe during unexpected beats while their typically reading peers did not, perhaps in support of prior evidence of frontal lobe compensation in dyslexia. Data collection is expected to conclude in early summer 2025. In addition to ANOVAs and post hoc t-tests our planned future analysis will include correlational analyses to evaluate the link between amount of musical training and the amplitude of these P3 responses. We will also evaluate functional connectivity during these tasks to evaluate potential compensatory networks in dyslexia.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental,