An electrophysiological investigation of the temporal asynchrony effect on character-speech sound integration in Chinese typically developing children and children with dyslexia

摘要: The neural mechanism of orthographic-phonological integration was influenced by the temporal relationship of cross-modal stimuli. However, previous studies mainly investigated the neural mechanism of letter-speech sound integration in precise temporal synchrony or small temporal asynchrony conditions. In this study, character-speech sound integration was investigated in a relatively wide temporal window. Chinese characters were presented synchronously to the onset of speech sounds or before speech sound by 300 or 600 ms (referred as AV0, AV300 and AV600). ERP responses evoked by congruent condition (speech sounds were paired with congruent visual characters) and baseline condition (speech sounds were paired with Korean characters) were compared. Different electrophysiological markers were found in the temporal synchrony and temporal asynchrony conditions. In the AV0 condition, developing dyslexia (DD) and typically developing (TD) children showed similar congruency effect on P1, N170 and N300 components, demonstrating the influence of speech sound on visual character processing. In the AV300 condition, DD group showed left-lateralized congruency effect on N200, whereas TD children showed bilateral congruency effect on N200. Both groups showed bilateral congruency effect on N200 in the AV600 condition. We speculate that the insufficient character-speech sound integration exhibited by dyslexic children in the AV300 condition was probably caused by their slow visual processing speed. The results provide unique insight into the neural mechanism of print-speech integration in a wide temporal window and point out the necessity to investigate neural mechanism of print-speech integration in a relatively wide temporal window.