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Greater reliance on sentence context during naturalistic listening predicts larger reading gains over two years

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Poster D119 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port

Daniel Kleinman^1,2, Luca Campanelli^2,3, Brittany Lee⁴, Julie Van Dyke^1,2, Christian Brodbeck⁴, Nicole Landi^2,4; ¹Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, ²Haskins Laboratories, ³The University of Alabama, ⁴University of Connecticut

Individuals with decoding-based reading disability (also known as dyslexia) often exhibit deficits in phonological processing (Shaywitz, 1996), including deficits in speech sound processing (Schulte-Körne & Bruder, 2010; Vellutino et al., 2004) and in low-level auditory processing more generally (Giraud & Ramus, 2013; Lehongre et al., 2011). Many children with reading disability also have higher-level language difficulties (Adlof & Hogan, 2018), including using auditory sentence contexts to generate predictions about upcoming words (Sabisch et al., 2006; see Hestvik et al., 2022 for evidence in children with DLD). Here, we used naturalistic stimuli (audiobooks) and assessed how well each individual’s EEG “tracked” content as it accrued during story comprehension across multiple linguistic levels, as indexed by linguistic surprisal and entropy derived from a sentence context model. Then, we asked whether this content-tracking measure was related to contemporaneous and/or future reading ability. METHOD: Participants (n=28) were students with reading disability attending schools specializing in remediating language- and reading-based disabilities (at study enrollment, mean age=10.3 years, SD=1.6 years, range=7.5–13.2 years). To measure word reading ability, participants were administered the TOWRE Sight Word Efficiency subtest, a timed test of word decoding (µ=100; sample M=84, SD=11, range=66–117). This test was administered 4-5 times at 6-month intervals; gains were measured as average change in score per year. At the first timepoint, participants also listened to audiobook excerpts for 12 minutes while their EEG was recorded. A sentence (lexical 5-gram) context model was used to quantify word surprisal, cohort entropy, and phoneme entropy for all words and phonemes in the excerpts, based on the four preceding words and the partial current word. Then, time-lagged regression analyses were used to measure how much each participant’s EEG covaried with this time series of linguistic probabilities, while controlling for acoustic predictors, sublexical context, and lexical context (see Brodbeck et al., 2022 for more details). RESULTS: Participants who relied more on sentence context to generate and evaluate predictions about upcoming words and phonemes during the listening task showed significantly greater gains in reading scores over the next 1.5 to 2 years (Δr2=16%, p=.027), controlling for initial reading scores and age. Descriptively, this effect was driven by a centroparietal negativity to phonemes in more contextually surprising words from 200 to 350 ms – consistent with an N400 effect (auditory N400 onset begins around 200 ms; e.g., Heilbron et al., 2022) – which was more pronounced in participants who made larger gains. In contrast, reliance on sentence context was not related to contemporaneous reading ability (Δr2 < 1%, p=.75). CONCLUSIONS: The present study provides further evidence that neural responses to continuous speech can index individual differences in predictive processing (cf. Gillis et al., 2023; Keshavarzi et al., 2022), while also showing that these differences can identify listeners who are on the verge of making substantial reading gains which are not reflected in current reading scores. Speculatively, leveraging sentence contexts to generate predictions about upcoming speech in real-time may allow a listener to derive more benefit from linguistic input, enabling faster progress in reading-related skills.

Topic Areas: Reading, Speech Perception