Regularized Neural-Congruency on Spoonerism: Toward exploring the neural-underpinnings of reading disorders on phonological processing tasks

Abstract

Children’s performance on the spoonerism task, a behavioral test that measures phonological processing skills, predicts reading abilities and related disorders. However, this relationship between phonological processing skills and dyslexia has been primarily examined based on behavioral responses to the spoonerism task. As a result, there is a growing interest in developmental neuroscience to explore the neural origins of this relationship and its relation to reading difficulties. Yet, traditional electroencephalography (EEG) analysis methods had little success identifying informative neural components that depict neural differences in children with reading disorders during spoonerism. The current study explores a novel computational approach to isolate informative neural signatures elicited during the spoonerism test. We apply our method to EEG data obtained from a group of children with dyslexia and controls during the execution of a spoonerism task. Our findings demonstrate that our method extracts components that characterize the neural origins of complex cognitive phonological processes, explains differences between children with dyslexia and controls, and generates novel insights into the neural underpinnings of dyslexia in children.