An oscillopathic approach to developmental dyslexia: from genes to speech processing

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is a heterogeneous condition entailing problems with reading and spelling. Several genes have been linked or associated to the disease, many of which contribute to the development and function of brain areas that are important for auditory and phonological processing. Nonetheless, a clear link between genes, the brain, and the symptoms of dyslexia is still pending. The goal of this paper is contributing to bridge this gap. With this aim, we have focused on how the dyslexic brain fails to process speech sounds and reading cues. We have adopted an oscillatory perspective, according to which dyslexia results from a deficient integration of different brain rhythms during reading/spellings tasks. Moreover, we show that some candidates for this condition are related to brain rhythms. This approach should help gain a better understanding of the aetiology and the clinical presentation of developmental dyslexia, but also achieve an earlier and more accurate diagnosis of the disease.

Why brain oscillations are improving our understanding of language

“…In a series of related papers (Benítez-Burraco and Murphy 2016; Murphy and Benítez-Burraco 2016;Jiménez-Bravo et al, 2017;Benítez-Burraco, 2018a, Wilkinson andMurphy, 2016) we have shown that the distinctive language deficits found in clinical conditions like ASD, SZ, and DD can be satisfactorily construed in terms of an abnormal, disorder-specific pattern of brain rhythmicity. Interestingly, we have also shown that selected candidate genes for the language oscillogenome exhibit a distinctive, disorder-specific pattern of up-and downregulation in the brain of patients.…”