Project description
Cracking the code of speech in dyslexia
Understanding speech is something most of us take for granted. For people with dyslexia, the process is far from simple. They struggle to isolate individual sounds (phonemes) and often show disrupted brain rhythms when tracking the natural flow of speech. Yet, remarkably, many still comprehend spoken language just fine. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the DecodPhones project is uncovering how that is possible. By analysing brain responses to natural speech, artificial speech, and even nonsensical ‘Jabberwocky’ sentences, researchers aim to map how people with and without dyslexia decode phonetic information. The findings could reveal how the brain compensates for deficits, and pave the way for smarter, more targeted interventions that support language processing in dyslexia.
Objective
A core aspect of language comprehension is the extraction of phonetic information from speech. This process is non-trivial due to the transient nature of phonetic segments and their overlapping presence in the acoustic signal. We aim to gain a deeper understanding of this complex process in the context of dyslexia. Individuals with this reading impairment have been found to process two aspects of speech differently from typical readers: they have difficulty extracting individual phonemes from words, and they show signs of imprecise cortical tracking of the speech envelope, an important correlate of speech prosody. However, it is unclear how exactly imprecise tracking of speech leads to phoneme-level deficits. Moreover, despite these deficits, natural speech comprehension in dyslexia remains intact, suggesting that compensation may take place. We address these gaps by applying state-of-the-art phonetic decoding analyses in dyslexia for the first time while varying prosodic and lexical cues within the speech signal. A novel analytical approach will reveal how listeners with and without dyslexia track phonetic segments over time, retain their correct order, and decode them into distinct phonetic representations. Cortical responses to phonetic segments will be tracked in natural speech, in synthesised speech with impoverished prosodic cues, and in meaningless pseudospeech (Jabberwocky) while MEG data are recorded. Comparing the neural dynamics of phonetic decoding in natural speech to speech with impoverished prosodic information will show to what extent prosodic cues facilitate decoding of fine-grained phonetic information. Comparing natural speech to pseudospeech will reveal whether poor phonetic decoding can be compensated with top-down information. The project will provide a better understanding of how phonetic information is extracted from speech and how this may relate to the persistent deficits in dyslexia, with important implications for theory and remediation.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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20009 San Sebastian
Spain
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