Behavioural and neural processes underlying the formation of phoneme representations in children with dyslexia.

Learning to read consists of coupling letters to speech sounds (i.e. phonemes). In this perspective, it is important to built up, already before reading, well specified representations of phonemes. The development of good phoneme representations is based on good auditory skills, since it requires to hear subtle differences between phonemes. Above, sensitivity to the frequency distribution of speech sounds is needed to learn to categorize sounds that are clearly heard as distinct, i.e. statistical learning. For many years, phoneme representations have been considered the core deficit in developmental dyslexia, a neurological disorder characterised by severe and persistent reading impairments. Yet, direct behavioural and neurological evidence on the formation of phoneme representations remains scarce, and is even non-existent for statistical learning of speech sounds. With this project we want to fill in this gap. Via behavioural measurements we will examine the quality of phoneme representations, auditory processing and statistical learning. The use of different MRI techniques will allow us to examine which brain regions are involved in phoneme representations, how these regions are connected and which hemisphere is most important. Testing these behavioural and neural aspects in dyslexic and normal reading children will allow us to detect what hampers the formation of phoneme representations.