The Relation between Physiological Parameters and Colour Modifications in Text Background and Overlay during Reading in Children with and without Dyslexia

Abstract

Reading is one of the essential processes during the maturation of an individual. It is estimated that 5–10% of school-age children are affected by dyslexia, the reading disorder characterised by difficulties in the accuracy or fluency of word recognition. There are many studies which have reported that coloured overlays and background could improve the reading process, especially in children with reading disorders. As dyslexia has neurobiological origins, the aim of the present research was to understand the relationship between physiological parameters and colour modifications in the text and background during reading in children with and without dyslexia. We have measured differences in electroencephalography (EEG), heart rate variability (HRV), electrodermal activities (EDA) and eye movements of the 36 school-age (from 8 to 12 years old) children (18 with dyslexia and 18 of control group) during the reading task in 13 combinations of background and overlay colours. Our findings showed that the dyslexic children have longer reading duration, fixation count, fixation duration average, fixation duration total, and longer saccade count, saccade duration total, and saccade duration average while reading on white and coloured background/overlay. It was found that the turquoise background, turquoise overlay, and yellow background colours are beneficial for dyslexic readers, as they achieved the shortest time duration of the reading tasks when these colours were used. Additionally, dyslexic children have higher values of beta (15–40 Hz) and the broadband EEG (0.5–40 Hz) power while reading in one particular colour (purple), as well as increasing theta range power while reading with the purple overlay. We have observed no significant differences between HRV parameters on white colour, except for single colours (purple, turquoise overlay, and yellow overlay) where the control group showed higher values for mean HR, while dyslexic children scored higher with mean RR. Regarding EDA measure, we found systematically lower values in children with dyslexia in comparison to the control group. Based on the present results, we can conclude that both pastel and intense background/overlays are beneficial for reading of both groups and all sensor modalities could be used to better understand the neurophysiological origins in dyslexic children.

Evidence from ERP and Eye Movements as Markers of Language Dysfunction in Dyslexia

“…The authors suggested the importance of carrying out studies on dyslexia combining both neurophysiological and eye gaze data. Jakovljevic et al [ 80 ] studied the effect of colored overlays and backgrounds in 18 dyslexic Serbian children and 18 controls combining different oculomotor markers and neural oscillatory responses. They showed that the dyslexic children presented not only abnormal oculomotor patterns but also higher values of frequency bands (e.g., beta between 15 and 40 Hz) with purple overlay.…”

Spatiotemporal Eye-Tracking Feature Set for Improved Recognition of Dyslexic Reading Patterns in Children

“…Brain-imaging methodology most prominently focuses on functional magnetic resonance imaging during reading [15,16] and diffusion tensor imaging [16,17], which both show, respectively, the functional or morphological differences between the dyslexic and the control group. Brain activity can be monitored using electroencephalography (EEG) as well, either on its own [18][19][20] or in combination with other biometric signals, such as heart rate, electrodermal activity (EDA), and eye tracking [21][22][23][24].…”

“…The data analysis in this paper was conducted on the dataset described in our previous research [22,41]. The data were gathered from 30 subjects, 15 diagnosed with dyslexia and 15 control subjects (age: 7-13, gender: 19 female, 11 male), during a study approved by the ethical committee of the Psychology Department of the University of Niš (a branch of the Serbian Psychology Association), experimental procedure No.…”

EEG correlates of developmental dyslexia: a systematic review

“…Most studies compared the EEG and the performance of DD and control children in linguistic, reading, or cognitive (Go-noGo, attention, reasoning, etc.) tasks Flynn & Deering, 1989a, 1989bFlynn et al, 1992;Galin et al, 1988Galin et al, , 1992Jakovljević et al, 2021;Klimesch et al, 2001;Leisman, 2002;Mahmoodin et al, 2016;Ortiz et al, 1992;Penolazzi et al, 2008;Remschmidt & Warnke, 1992;Rippon & Brunswick, 2000;Seri & Cerquiglini, 1993;Spironelli et al, 2006Spironelli et al, , 2008Taskov & Dushanova, 2020Žarić et al, 2017). A smaller number of other studies evaluate several other tasks: writing, speech, spelling, music, during the vision of an audio story, listening, and tapping (Colling et al, 2017;Di Liberto et al, 2018; Fig.…”