Lohvansuu, K. 1, 2 , Hämäläinen, J. A. 1, 2 & Leppänen, P. . 1, 2
1 Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä
2 Jyväskylä Centre for Interdisciplinary Brain Research, University of Jyväskylä
Risk for dyslexia is highly increased if reading or writing difficulties occur in the family. In at-risk children brain responses to speech are atypical already at birth and they predict pre-reading and early reading skills. ERPs of 26 at-risk infant and 22 controls to pseudo-words differing in a phonemic length (at:a/, /ata/) were measured at age of 6 months and associations between brain responses and pre-reading abilities in pre-school and reading in 14 years were studied. In at- risk children, a strong association between infant brain responses and reading speed at 14 years was found, providing the first evidence of predicting power until adolescence. Left hemisphere brain activation predicted 44% of reading speed score at 14 years, and also improved the prediction of the reading speed over neurocognitive skills measured at preschool age: phonology, verbal short-term memory, and letter knowledge. However, the association between brain activation and reading speed was mediated via rapid naming ability, suggesting rapid naming and reading speed to share a similar cognitive process of automatized access to lexicon via phonological representations. Brain activation to speech sounds in infancy probably acts as an index of deficient development of phonological representations also affecting lexical access.