Gojko Žarić

Maastricht University | UM · Department of Cognitive Neuroscience

Atypical structural properties of the brain’s white matter bundles have been associated with failing reading acquisition in developmental dyslexia. Because these white matter properties may show dynamic changes with age and orthographic depth, we examined fractional anisotropy (FA) along 16 white matter tracts in 8- to 11-year-old dyslexic (DR) and...

Reading is a complex cognitive skill subserved by a distributed network of visual and language-related regions. Disruptions of connectivity within this network have been associated with developmental dyslexia but their relation to individual differences in the severity of reading problems remains unclear. Here we investigate whether dysfunctional c...

Simultaneously presented visual events lead to temporally asynchronous percepts. This has led some researchers to conclude that the asynchronous experience is a manifestation of differences in neural processing time for different visual attributes. Others, however, have suggested that the asynchronous experience is due to differences in temporal ma...

A failure to build solid letter-speech sound associations may contribute to reading impairments in developmental dyslexia. Whether this reduced neural integration of letters and speech sounds changes over time within individual children and how this relates to behavioral gains in reading skills remains unknown. In this research, we examined changes...

The acquisition of letter-speech sound associations is one of the basic requirements for fluent reading acquisition and its failure may contribute to reading difficulties in developmental dyslexia. Here we investigated event-related potential (ERP) measures of letter-speech sound integration in 9-year-old typical and dyslexic readers and specifical...

Machine learning can be used to find meaningful patterns characterizing individual differences. Deploying a machine learning classifier fed by local features derived from graph analysis of electroencephalographic (EEG) data, we aimed at designing a neurobiologically-based classifier to differentiate two groups of children, one group with and the ot...

Fluency oriented intervention for struggling readers: reading fluency gains and neural changes in visual word processing

We use a neurocognitive perspective to discuss the contribution of learning letter-speech sound (L-SS) associations and visual specialization in the initial phases of reading in dyslexic children. We review findings from associative learning studies on related cognitive skills important for establishing and consolidating L-SS associations. Then we...

Objective: Neuroimaging research suggested a mixed pattern of functional connectivity abnormalities in developmental dyslexia. We examined differences in the topological properties of functional networks between 29 dyslexics and 15 typically reading controls in 3rd grade using graph analysis. Graph metrics characterize brain networks in terms of i...

The present study examined training effects in dyslexic children on reading fluency and the amplitude of N170, a negative brain-potential component elicited by letter and symbol strings. A group of 18 children with dyslexia in 3rd grade (9.05 ± 0.46 years old) was tested before and after following a letter-speech sound mapping training. A group of...

Fluent reading requires both fast recognition of written text and an automatic link to the speech sounds that these letters represent. This thesis investigates brain mechanisms underlying both processes in nine year old typically reading and dyslexic children. By measuring electrical brain responses we showed that impairments in the neural coupling...

A recent account of dyslexia assumes that a failure to develop automated letter-speech sound integration might be responsible for the observed lack of reading fluency. This study uses a pre-test-training-post-test design to evaluate the effects of a training program based on letter-speech sound associations with a special focus on gains in reading...

Touchscreen used in the training. (TIFF)

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Reading is a complex cognitive skill subserved by a distributed network of visual and language-related regions. Disruptions of the connections within this network are proposed as a possible cause of reading dysfunction in developmental dyslexia. Here we investigated effective connectivity in the reading network of 9-year-old typically reading child...

Introduction Although most children learn to read fluently, up to 10% of children are diagnosed with developmental dyslexia exhibiting deficient reading skills despite normal cognitive abilities and schooling opportunities (Snowling, 2013). The formation of letter-speech sound pairs, an important first step in obtaining reading expertise in alphabe...

Graph Analysis of EEG Resting State Functional Networks in Dyslexic and Typically Reading Children

The field of educational neuroscience aims to optimize learning environments through a better understanding of the neural and cognitive bases of academic skills. One of the driving forces behind educational neuroscience is research focused on reading development and the origins of dyslexia, characterized by a lack of reading fluency. An important s...

The specialization of visual brain areas for fast processing of printed words plays an important role in the acquisition of reading skills. Dysregulation of these areas may be among the deficits underlying developmental dyslexia. The present study examines the specificity of word activation in dyslexic children in 3rd grade by comparing early compo...

Letter-speech sounds intervention for children with dyslexia: reading fluency gains and neural changes in visual word processing

The acquisition of letter-speech sound associations is one of the basic requirements for learning to read fluently and its failure may cause reading difficulties in developmental dyslexia. We employed a cross-modal oddball paradigm to study relationship between fluency and neural markers of letter-speech sound association in 18 severely dysfluent d...

The acquisition of letter-speech sound associations is one of the basic requirements for learning to read and deficient letter-speech sound associations may form the basis for reading difficulties in developmental dyslexia. Previous electrophysiological studies employing a cross-modal oddball paradigm revealed a late automation of these association...