Neural Responses to Musical Rhythm in Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties

Behavioral and neural rhythm sensitivities predict phonological awareness and word reading development in Chinese

The present study examined both the development of behavioral and electrophysiological rhythm processing and their contribution to phonological awareness and word reading in Chinese. We followed a sample of 47 Mandarin-speaking Chinese children from age 9 (Grade 3) to age 11 (Grade 5). Results showed first a significant improvement over time in behavioral beat perception and in P3as for small beat changes. Second, behavioral and neural beat sensitivities at age 9 predicted phonological awareness (phoneme deletion and tone identification) at age 11 and its development over the two-year span of the study. Neural beat sensitivities at age 9 also explained unique variance in reading accuracy (but not reading fluency) at age 11 and its two-year development. Taken together, these findings suggest that rhythm and Chinese reading-related skills are intricately related. Neural rhythm sensitivities could serve as predictive biomarkers for the development of phonological awareness and reading in Chinese school-age children.

Dyslexia: A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis

Dyslexia is a disorder characterized by an impaired ability to understand written and printed words or phrases. Epidemiological longitudinal data show that dyslexia is highly prevalent, affecting 10-20% of the population regardless of gender. This study aims to provide a detailed overview of research status and development characteristics of dyslexia from types of articles, years, countries, institutions, journals, authors, author keywords, and highly cited papers. A total of 9,166 publications have been retrieved from the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) from 2000 to 2021. The United States of America, United Kingdom, and Germany were the top three most productive countries in terms of the number of publications. China, Israel, and Japan led the Asia research on dyslexia. University of Oxford had the most publications and won first place in terms of h-index. Dyslexia was the most productive journal in this field and Psychology was the most used subject category. Keywords analysis indicated that "developmental dyslexia," "phonological awareness," children and fMRI were still the main research topics. "Literacy," "rapid automatized naming (RAN)," "assessment," "intervention," "meta-analysis," "Chinese," "executive function," "morphological awareness," "decoding," "dyscalculia," "EEG," "Eye tracking," "rhythm," "bilingualism," and "functional connectivity" might become the new research hotspots.