PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Florian Destoky
AU  - Julie Bertels
AU  - Maxime Niesen
AU  - Vincent Wens
AU  - Marc Vander Ghinst
AU  - Jacqueline Leybaert
AU  - Marie Lallier
AU  - Robin A. A. Ince
AU  - Joachim Gross
AU  - Xavier De Tiège
AU  - Mathieu Bourguignon
TI  - Cortical tracking of speech in noise accounts for reading strategies in children
AID  - 10.1101/2020.01.16.907667
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.01.16.907667
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/17/2020.01.16.907667.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/17/2020.01.16.907667.full
AB  - Humans’ propensity to acquire literacy relates to several factors, among which, the ability to understand speech in noise (SiN). Still, the nature of the relation between reading and SiN perception abilities remains poorly understood. Here, we dissect the interplay between (i) reading abilities, (ii) classical behavioral predictors of reading (phonological awareness, phonological memory and lexical access), and (iii) electrophysiological markers of SiN perception in 99 elementary school children (26 with dyslexia). We demonstrate that cortical representation of phrasal content of SiN relates to the development of the lexical (but not sublexical) reading strategy. In contrast, classical behavioral predictors of reading abilities and the ability to benefit from visual speech to represent the syllabic content of SiN account for global reading performance (i.e., speed and accuracy of lexical and sublexical reading). Finally, we found that individuals with dyslexia properly integrate visual speech information to optimize processing of syntactic information, but not to sustain acoustic/phonemic processing. These results clarify the nature of the relation between SiN perception and reading abilities in typical and dyslexic child readers, and identified novel electrophysiological markers of emergent literacy.