An Association between Auditory–Visual Synchrony Processing and Reading Comprehension: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Abstract

The perceptual system integrates synchronized auditory-visual signals in part to promote individuation of objects in cluttered environments. The processing of auditory-visual synchrony may more generally contribute to cognition by synchronizing internally generated multimodal signals. Reading is a prime example because the ability to synchronize internal phonological and/or lexical processing with visual orthographic processing may facilitate encoding of words and meanings. Consistent with this possibility, developmental and clinical research has suggested a link between reading performance and the ability to compare visual spatial/temporal patterns with auditory temporal patterns. Here, we provide converging behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggesting that greater behavioral ability to judge auditory-visual synchrony (Experiment 1) and greater sensitivity of an electrophysiological marker of auditory-visual synchrony processing (Experiment 2) both predict superior reading comprehension performance, accounting for 16% and 25% of the variance, respectively. These results support the idea that the mechanisms that detect auditory-visual synchrony contribute to reading comprehension.

Boys-Specific Text-Comprehension Enhancement With Dual Visual-Auditory Text Presentation Among 12–14 Years-Old Students

“…The fact that Flores et al (2010) detected transfer gender-differences in older subjects suggests that learning and developmental changes compensate for reading difficulties in boys only to some extent. Friederici (2012) and recently Mossbridge et al (2017), conducted researches where they predicted the support of cognition in dual or crossmodal visual-auditory signals by enabling the dynamic coordination of inner and sensory processes. This might suggest that receiving information using diverse sensory pathways can enhance performance (Bulkin and Groh, 2006); in our results, the combination of visual displays and auditory information might have improved the performance of the group in general or benefit those students with the worst performance, as the dual-modality may have facilitated the task for them.…”