Atypical right hemisphere response to slow temporal modulations in children with developmental dyslexia

Phase entrainment of neuronal oscillations is thought to play a central role in encoding speech. Children with developmental dyslexia show impaired phonological processing of speech, proposed theoretically to be related to atypical phase entrainment to slower temporal modulations in speech (< 10 Hz). While studies of children with dyslexia have found atypical phase entrainment in the delta band (~ 2 Hz), some studies of adults with developmental dyslexia have shown impaired entrainment in the low gamma band (~ 35–50 Hz). Meanwhile, studies of neurotypical adults suggest asymmetric temporal sensitivity in auditory cortex, with preferential processing of slower modulations by right auditory cortex, and faster modulations processed bilaterally. Here we compared neural entrainment to slow (2 Hz) versus faster (40 Hz) amplitude-modulated noise using fNIRS to study possible hemispheric asymmetry effects in children with developmental dyslexia. We predicted atypical right hemisphere responding to 2 Hz modulations for the children with dyslexia in comparison to control children, but equivalent responding to 40 Hz modulations in both hemispheres. Analyses of HbO concentration revealed a right-lateralised region focused on the supra-marginal gyrus that was more active in children with dyslexia than in control children for 2 Hz stimulation. We discuss possible links to linguistic prosodic processing, and interpret the data with respect to a neural ‘temporal sampling’ framework for conceptualizing the phonological deficits that characterise children with developmental dyslexia across languages.