Behavioural and Physiological Measures of Young Students With Dyslexia

Assessing Behavioural and Electrophysiological Effects of Reading Intervention in School-age Children With Dyslexia

The proposed is reading intervention study to track neural changes in the brain. Students with dyslexia will participate in a reading study. Pre and post-analysis data will be obtained to see whether there will be positive neural and behavioural change.

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: EEG
• Intervention / Treatment: Behavioral: Set For Variability; Behavioral: Current Best Practices

Detailed Description

A learning disability in reading is one of the most common neurobiological diagnoses in school-aged children. Statistics Canada reported that 3.2% of children in Canada have a learning disability (LD), making LD the most prevalent type of childhood condition. The new definition of LD has become more complicated to diagnose and treat children. Canadian universities invested recently in conducting research that tracks neural changes in the identification and remediation of LD. Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most common tools to inquire about brain information processing and neural changes. However, only one German study has used a reading intervention and EEG to track neural changes of children with LD in reading. This study delivered two reading interventions but did not report which intervention affected reading improvement. Hence, little is known about reading interventions that would induce positive neural changes in young children with LD. This proposal aims to implement a specific reading intervention in children and track neuronal changes. The results of this proposal will be invaluable in improving the predictive tools we use for early diagnosis of LD in reading, identifying better-targeted reading interventions, and in better allocation of resources to health and educational services.

To understand how the brain processes language in real-time, Event-Related Potential (ERPs) studies have been commonly used to assess the neural underpinnings of reading disability (RD), especially in children. Of particular interest, the N400 is a negative ERP waveform peaking at 400 milliseconds that is sensitive to the lexico-semantic aspect of language. The N400 represents an important language-relevant measure that can be used to investigate the neural basis of reading comprehension acquisition in typical readers, a process critical to reading development in school-age populations. The N400 assesses lexical-semantic processing when a student is introduced to a sentence with a pseudoword or a semantically incorrect word, as in "the pizza was too hot to cry." The N400 is sensitive in typical readers, indicating that they understand the semantic incongruity. There is also evidence that the N400 is atypical in individuals with reading disabilities and reading comprehension deficits.

These brain-based explanations give educational practice and understanding of the neural processes underlying reading difficulties, reading comprehension deficits, and potentially effective intervention mechanisms. Several studies demonstrate the potential relevance of neuroimaging for identifying a reading disability. Researchers have also shown that neural changes occur after a successful reading intervention. However, it remains unknown whether a reading intervention modulates reading-relevant brain activity, such as that of the N400.

One common approach to this problem is to teach common exception words by sight. An alternative approach some researchers have proposed is that in addition to teaching phonics, children are to be trained to "generate alternative pronunciations when they come to unknown words until they produce a pronunciation that is a real word, and which makes sense in context". This process is known as Set-for-Variability (SfV). For example, a child is taught the standard pronunciation of "ch" in the match, hatch, and catch. The child would then use this regularized pronunciation of "ch" to read the word stomach, an irregular spelled word. If a child fails to read the irregularly spelled word stomach using regularized pronunciation, then "the child has to change one or more sound associations and try again". Set-for-Variability is "the ability to determine the correct pronunciation of proximation to spoken English words". This means making a link from 'spelling pronunciations' (the product of synthetic phonics such as 'c'-'a'-'t' from the printed word 'cat') to a conventional pronunciation of that word. If pronouncing a word does not produce a meaningful phrase in context, the individual would need to try a different pronunciation.

The proposed study is a randomized-control study where thirty-eight students aged 6-7 years with a reading disability will be randomly assigned into a control and intervention group. The participants will be matched on age, IQ, and reading level before randomization. Participants in the control group will be included in a Current Best Practices (CBP) group and exposed to an intervention that focuses on grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. In addition to the CBP, participants in the intervention group will receive 8-10 weeks of the Set-for-Variability intervention. Pre-post behavioural measures will be conducted to see if the Set-for-Variability intervention impacts word reading measured using validated assessment tools and the N400 amplitude. The present research will provide the first empirical data on the neural changes following a "Set-for-Variability"-based reading intervention.

• Study Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Actual): 30
• Phase: Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• Canada
  • Quebec
    • Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A1Y2
      • McGill University

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: 6 years to 8 years (Child)
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

• Have a diagnosis with Dyslexia from school psychologists, a psychiatrist

Exclusion Criteria:

• Have a comorbid diagnosis with ADHD and Autism
• Have Epilespy

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Prevention
• Allocation: Randomized
• Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
• Masking: Single

Number of Arms

2

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm	Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Set for Variability; Students in the experimental group will receive an average of 10-12 hrs. of small group intervention. All lessons will include (i) a focus on blending and segmenting phonemes within a synthetic phonics model, (ii) teaching common, vocabulary words (iii)shared book reading, and (iv) Set-for-variability component (SfV). This component will focus on teaching students how to find the sound variation of a grapheme-phoneme rule. For example when to use the sound /k/in /ch/ to read words such as "stomach"	Behavioral: Set For Variability; This intervention will focus on training students to use a sound variation of grapheme correspondence rule in order to read an irregular spelling word correctly.
Active Comparator: Current best practices; The control group will receive current-best practices (CBP). The participants will receive a similar approach as in the intervention group without Set-for-Variability. The participants will receive (i) a focus on blending and segmenting phonemes within a synthetic phonics model, (ii) vocabulary, (iii) shared book reading, and (iv) the absence of teaching Set-for-Variability. Instead of Set-for-variability, the participants will receive sight word reading of frequent words. They will learn the most frequent pronunciation of vowels: ee, ea, oo, ou, oa, ai, ay	Behavioral: Current Best Practices; This active control intervention will focus on training students to use grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules and sight words in the absence of set-for-variability component

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Physiological parameter using EEG	Time to detect the N400 after the onset of the target word at a window of 350-650 milliseconds. If the time of the N400 does not occur within this time frame window, this might indicate semantic integration deficits/and participant did not respond well to the intervention.	10 weeks after baseline

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Standardized reading measures	Reading measures: Castle and Coltheart Word reading, Woodcock Johnson grapheme phoneme, WIAT reading comprehension and Set-for-Variability. [Percentile range]. Scores between 75-97 percentile are considered average to above average. Scores between 9-25 percentile are considered low and below average. Depending on where the participant scores will show improvement or no improvement to the intervention.	10 weeks after baseline

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: McGill University

Publications and helpful links

General Publications

• Kutas M, Federmeier KD. Thirty years and counting: finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Annu Rev Psychol. 2011;62:621-47. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.131123.
• Hasko S, Groth K, Bruder J, Bartling J, Schulte-Korne G. What does the brain of children with developmental dyslexia tell us about reading improvement? ERP evidence from an intervention study. Front Hum Neurosci. 2014 Jun 26;8:441. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00441. eCollection 2014.
• Tunmer WE, Chapman JW. The simple view of reading redux: vocabulary knowledge and the independent components hypothesis. J Learn Disabil. 2012 Sep-Oct;45(5):453-66. doi: 10.1177/0022219411432685. Epub 2012 Jan 31.
• Schulz E, Maurer U, van der Mark S, Bucher K, Brem S, Martin E, Brandeis D. Impaired semantic processing during sentence reading in children with dyslexia: combined fMRI and ERP evidence. Neuroimage. 2008 May 15;41(1):153-68. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.02.012. Epub 2008 Mar 10.

Helpful Links

• Woodcock Johnson reading achievement test
• WIAT reading comprehension test

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Actual): October 1, 2022
• Primary Completion (Actual): May 30, 2023
• Study Completion (Actual): May 30, 2023

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: April 25, 2022
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: May 13, 2022
• First Posted (Actual): May 17, 2022

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): May 21, 2025
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: May 17, 2025
• Last Verified: May 1, 2025

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Keywords: EEG; N400; reading intervention; reading disability; pre-post
• Additional Relevant MeSH Terms: Specific Learning Disorder; Neurologic Manifestations; Nervous System Diseases; Mental Disorders; Neurobehavioral Manifestations; Neurodevelopmental Disorders; Communication Disorders; Language Disorders; Learning Disabilities; Dyslexia
• Other Study ID Numbers: Intervention & EEG

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: NO

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No
• product manufactured in and exported from the U.S.: No