​Tracking speech and song in adults with dyslexia

​Dyslexia is an impairment in reading ability associated with phonological and temporal deficits in processing. Research has shown that some people with dyslexia develop compensatory abilities that help improve their reading comprehension (e.g. music skills). Since the rhythm in music is more regular than speech, the onsets of syllables in song may be easier to process than those in speech. Speech and song sounds are both represented through amplitude envelope of a sound wave. The better the brain is at tracking these waveforms, the more successful one is at processing and, potentially comprehending, language. Unlike previous research which has focused on typical adults or only on EEG data, my research examines whether adults with dyslexia are better at tracking the rhythms of song than speech and examines various behavioural measures that may be associated with tracking abilities. I hypothesize that the brains of those with dyslexia would display better neural tracking in the song condition than in the speech condition due to rhythmic regularity found in music. To test this, participants listened to speech and song clips while their brain activity was recorded using EEG. Preliminary results suggest that adults with dyslexia track song and speech equally well. This contradicts the original hypothesis that song would be easier to track than speech, which means that music skill training may not be useful in improving reading comprehension in those with dyslexia. However, further research with more participants must be conducted to produce more conclusive results.