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Language problems can be predicted from newborn babies' brain responses
November 06, 2003Difficulties in reading, also called dyslexia, are major specific learning disabilities that affect children school achievement and their career choices.
The Jyv'¤skyl'¤ Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia, the only one of its kind in the world, now shows that babies' brain responses, obtained shortly after birth, do predict poorer language skills in the at-risk children. The results may have future applications for the early identification of children at risk for developmental language problems.
For his dissertation to be defended on Friday November 7, Tomi Guttorm has studied speech processing of newborn babies with and without familial risk for dyslexia. The dissertation was prepared in the Jyv'¤skyl'¤ Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia, headed by Professor Heikki Lyytinen. In this 10-year project, which is a part of the Human Development and Its Risk Factors Research Program, a Finnish Centre of Excellence, children are followed from birth to school-age. The at-risk children were born to families where at least one of the parents was diagnosed as dyslexic, and there were also reports of similar problems in close relatives. In the control group, there was no indication of reading problems.
The results show that brain responses to speech sounds do differ between at-risk and control newborns. These differences were associated with later language development.
According to the researcher, these results are promising in the view of early identification of language problems and planning of the interventions or rehabilitation programs.
Differences in brain activation predict later language development
In the at-risk group, the brain responses to speech stimuli were larger in the right hemisphere. These results are interesting, because according to the neuropsychological theory, the left hemisphere is thought to be specialized in speech processing. This atypical speech processing in the right hemisphere was associated with poorer performance in receptive language measures at the age of 2.5 years.
The predictive value of the newborn brain responses were confirmed with another path of study. The results show that the differentiation between speech stimuli in the right hemisphere predict poorer short-term verbal memory skills at the age of five years. Similar differentiation in the left hemisphere is, however, associated with better performance in receptive language measures at the age of 2.5 years and verbal memory measures at the age of 3.5 years.
Identification of early language problems allows early rehabilitation
In Finland, about 3-10 % of children at school-age are estimated to suffer from language difficulties. According to Guttorm, the results of the study could facilitate well-directed interventions even before language problems are typically diagnosed.
- In the forthcoming phases of our longitudinal project, we will further examine how these kinds of hemispheric differences in brain activation relate to reading skills and the possible diagnosis of dyslexia, Guttorm describes.
Brain activation was measured by event-related potentials (ERPs) that reflect brain's responses to presented speech stimuli. The study of infants shortly after birth allows for the differentiation of those factors already present at birth (possibly genetic in nature), from those that result from complex environmental interactions later in development.
Jyväskylä yliopisto
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