A Translational Framework of Educational Neuroscience in Learning Disorders.

Neuroimaging has undergone enormous progress during the last two and a half decades. The combination of neuroscientific methods and educational practice has become a focus of interdisciplinary research in order to answer more applied questions. In this realm, conditions that hamper learning success and have deleterious effects in the population - such as learning disorders (LD) - could especially profit from neuroimaging findings. At the moment, however, there is an ongoing debate about how far neuroscientific research can go to inform the practical work in educational settings. Here, we put forward a theoretical translational framework as a method of conducting neuroimaging and bridging it to education, with a main focus on dyscalculia and dyslexia. Our work seeks to represent a theoretical but mainly empirical guide on the benefits of neuroimaging, which can help people working with different aspects of LD, who need to act collaboratively to reach the full potential of neuroimaging. We provide possible ideas regarding how neuroimaging can inform LD at different levels within our multidirectional framework, i.e., mechanisms, diagnosis/prognosis, training/intervention, and community/education. In addition, we discuss methodological, conceptual, and structural limitations that need to be addressed by future research.

Early Stages of Sensory Processing, but Not Semantic Integration, Are Altered in Dyslexic Adults.

The aim of this study was to verify which stages of language processing are impaired in individuals with dyslexia. For this, a visual-auditory crossmodal task with semantic judgment was used. The P100 potentials were chosen, related to visual processing and initial integration, and N400 potentials related to semantic processing. Based on visual-auditory crossmodal studies, it is understood that dyslexic individuals present impairments in the integration of these two types of tasks and impairments in processing spoken and musical auditory information. The present study sought to investigate and compare the performance of 32 adult participants (14 individuals with dyslexia), in semantic processing tasks in two situations with auditory stimuli: sentences and music, with integrated visual stimuli (pictures). From the analysis of the accuracy, both the sentence and the music blocks showed significant effects on the congruency variable, with both groups having higher scores for the incongruent items than for the congruent ones. Furthermore, there was also a group effect when the priming was music, with the dyslexic group showing an inferior performance to the control group, demonstrating greater impairments in processing when the priming was music. Regarding the reaction time variable, a group effect in music and sentence priming was found, with the dyslexic group being slower than the control group. The N400 and P100 components were analyzed. In items with judgment and music priming, a group effect was observed for the amplitude of the P100, with higher means produced by individuals with dyslexia, corroborating the literature that individuals with dyslexia have difficulties in early information processing. A congruency effect was observed in the items with music priming, with greater P100 amplitudes found in incongruous situations. Analyses of the N400 component showed the congruency effect for amplitude in both types of priming, with the mean amplitude for incongruent items being greater than that of the congruent items. Electrophysiological findings were corroborated by the N400 literature and showed that the semantic processing of individuals with dyslexia was preserved. Furthermore, the findings indicate P100 visual sensory processing deficits in the dyslexic group and may suggest difficulty in the sensory stimuli process.

Reading component skills in dyslexia: word recognition, comprehension and processing speed.

The cognitive model of reading comprehension (RC) posits that RC is a result of the interaction between decoding and linguistic comprehension. Recently, the notion of decoding skill was expanded to include word recognition. In addition, some studies suggest that other skills could be integrated into this model, like processing speed, and have consistently indicated that this skill influences and is an important predictor of the main components of the model, such as vocabulary for comprehension and phonological awareness of word recognition. The following study evaluated the components of the RC model and predictive skills in children and adolescents with dyslexia. 40 children and adolescents (8-13 years) were divided in a Dyslexic Group (DG; 18 children, MA = 10.78, SD = 1.66) and control group (CG 22 children, MA = 10.59, SD = 1.86). All were students from the 2nd to 8th grade of elementary school and groups were equivalent in school grade, age, gender, and IQ. Oral and RC, word recognition, processing speed, picture naming, receptive vocabulary, and phonological awareness were assessed. There were no group differences regarding the accuracy in oral and RC, phonological awareness, naming, and vocabulary scores. DG performed worse than the CG in word recognition (general score and orthographic confusion items) and were slower in naming. Results corroborated the literature regarding word recognition and processing speed deficits in dyslexia. However, dyslexics can achieve normal scores on RC test. Data supports the importance of delimitation of different reading strategies embedded in the word recognition component. The role of processing speed in reading problems remain unclear.