Predicting Reading From Behavioral and Neural Measures - A Longitudinal Event-Related Potential Study

Aleksandra K Eberhard-Moscicka; Lea B Jost; Moritz M Daum; Urs Maurer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.733494

Predicting Reading From Behavioral and Neural Measures - A Longitudinal Event-Related Potential Study

Front Psychol. 2021 Nov 30:12:733494. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.733494. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Aleksandra K Eberhard-Moscicka^{1

2

3}, Lea B Jost^{1

4}, Moritz M Daum¹, Urs Maurer^{1

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
² Perception and Eye Movement Laboratory, Department of Neurology and BioMedical Research, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital and University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
³ Department of Neurology, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, Bern, Switzerland.
⁴ Department of Neuroscience and Movement Science, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland.
⁵ Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR, China.
⁶ Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR, China.

Abstract

Fluent reading is characterized by fast and effortless decoding of visual and phonological information. Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) and neuropsychological testing to probe the neurocognitive basis of reading in a sample of children with a wide range of reading skills. We report data of 51 children who were measured at two time points, i.e., at the end of first grade (mean age 7.6 years) and at the end of fourth grade (mean age 10.5 years). The aim of this study was to clarify whether next to behavioral measures also basic unimodal and bimodal neural measures help explaining the variance in the later reading outcome. Specifically, we addressed the question of whether next to the so far investigated unimodal measures of N1 print tuning and mismatch negativity (MMN), a bimodal measure of audiovisual integration (AV) contributes and possibly enhances prediction of the later reading outcome. We found that the largest variance in reading was explained by the behavioral measures of rapid automatized naming (RAN), block design and vocabulary (46%). Furthermore, we demonstrated that both unimodal measures of N1 print tuning (16%) and filtered MMN (7%) predicted reading, suggesting that N1 print tuning at the early stage of reading acquisition is a particularly good predictor of the later reading outcome. Beyond the behavioral measures, the two unimodal neural measures explained 7.2% additional variance in reading, indicating that basic neural measures can improve prediction of the later reading outcome over behavioral measures alone. In this study, the AV congruency effect did not significantly predict reading. It is therefore possible that audiovisual congruency effects reflect higher levels of multisensory integration that may be less important for reading acquisition in the first year of learning to read, and that they may potentially gain on relevance later on.

Keywords: EEG; ERP; MMN; N1 print tuning; audio-visual integration; development; longitudinal; reading.