Milene Bonte

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Maastricht University

Speaking involves the orchestration of multiple speech muscles while actively monitoring sensory consequences through auditory and somatosensory feedback. A mistuned sensorimotor mechanism may disrupt the normal integration of motor and auditory brain systems in several developmental and acquired motor speech disorders, including stuttering, speech...

Children show an enormous capacity to learn during development, but with large individual differences in the time course and trajectory of learning and the achieved skill level. Recent progress in developmental sciences has shown the contribution of a multitude of factors including genetic variation, brain plasticity, socio-cultural context and lea...

The acquisition of letter-speech sound correspondences is a fundamental process underlying reading development, one that could be influenced by several linguistic and domain-general cognitive factors. In the current study, we mimicked the first steps of this process by examining behavioral trajectories of audiovisual associative learning in 110 7-...

Auditory selective attention forms an important foundation of children's learning by enabling the prioritisation and encoding of relevant stimuli. It may also influence reading development, which relies on metalinguistic skills including the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. Reports of attentional impairments and speech perceptio...

Several theories of predictive processing propose reduced sensory and neural responses to anticipated events. Support comes from M/EEG studies, showing reduced auditory N1 and P2 responses to self- compared to externally generated events, or when the timing and form of stimuli are more predictable. The current study examined the sensitivity of N1 a...

Learning to read impacts the way the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT) reorganizes. The postulated underlying mechanism of neuronal recycling was recently revisited. Neuroimaging data showed that voxels weakly specialized for visual processing keep their initial category selectivity (i.e., object or face processing) while acquiring an additiona...

While children are able to name letters fairly quickly, the automatisation of letter-speech sound mappings continues over the first years of reading development. In the current longitudinal fMRI study, we explored developmental changes in cortical responses to letters and speech sounds across 3 yearly measurements in a sample of 18 8–11 year old ch...

Background Most of the literature on the relation between mindset and effort depends on subjective self-reports, which may not reliably capture the actual investment of effort. In the current study we (1) operationalized mental effort as the chosen and executed difficulty level in a self-adapted arithmetic task, and (2) combined variable-oriented a...

Reading Disability (RD) is often characterized by difficulties in the phonology of the language. While the molecular mechanisms underlying it are largely undetermined, loci are being revealed by genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In a previous GWAS for word reading (Price, 2020), we observed that top single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were...

Reading and writing are crucial life skills but roughly one in ten children are affected by dyslexia, which can persist into adulthood. Family studies of dyslexia suggest heritability up to 70%, yet few convincing genetic markers have been found. Here we performed a genome-wide association study of 51,800 adults self-reporting a dyslexia diagnosis...

Developmental dyslexia is often accompanied by altered phonological processing of speech. Underlying neural changes have typically been characterized in terms of stimulus- and/or task-related responses within individual brain regions or their functional connectivity. Less is known about potential changes in the more global functional organization o...

Listeners can rely on perceptual learning and recalibration in order to make reliable interpretations during speech perception. Lexical and audiovisual (or speech-read) information can disambiguate the incoming auditory signal when it is unclear, due to speaker-related characteristics, such as an unfamiliar accent, or due to environmental factors,...

Reading acquisition reorganizes existing brain networks for speech and visual processing to form novel audio-visual language representations. This requires substantial cortical plasticity that is reflected in changes in brain activation and functional as well as structural connectivity between brain areas. The extent to which a child’s brain can ac...

Capturing developmental and learning-induced brain dynamics is extremely challenging as changes occur interactively across multiple levels and emerging functions. Different levels include the (social) environment, cognitive and behavioral levels, structural and functional brain changes, and genetics, while functions include domains such as math, re...

In this project we investigate thalamo-cortical connectivity in 8-10 year-old children with and without developmental dyslexia comparing connectivity outcomes for matching letter-speech sound pairs and meaningless symbol-speech sound pairs. Our findings show: - Meaningful letter-sound associations affect thalamo-corticalconnectivity - Reading-rela...

While children are able to name letters fairly quickly, the automatization of letter-speech sound mappings continues over the first years of reading development. In the current longitudinal fMRI study, we explored developmental changes in cortical responses to letters and speech sounds across 3 yearly measurements in 8-11 year old children employin...

The different ways students deal with mistakes is an integral part of mindset theory. While previous error-monitoring studies found supporting neural evidence for mindset-related differences, they may have been confounded by overlapping stimulus processing. We therefore investigated the relationship between mindset and event-related potentials (ERP...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a learning disorder affecting the ability to read, with a heritability of 40-60%. A notable part of this heritability remains unexplained, and large genetic studies are warranted to identify new susceptibility genes and clarify the genetic bases of dyslexia. We carried out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on 227...

Some theories of predictive processing propose reduced sensory and neural responses to anticipated events. Support comes from M/EEG studies, showing reduced auditory N1 and P2 responses to self- compared to externally generated events, or when stimulus properties are more predictable (e.g. prototypical). The current study examined the sensitivity o...

Statistical learning, or the ability to extract statistical regularities from the sensory environment, plays a critical role in language acquisition and reading development. Here we employed electroencephalography (EEG) with frequency-tagging measures to track the temporal evolution of speech-structure learning in individuals with reading difficult...

The different ways students deal with mistakes is an integral part of mindset theory. While previous error-monitoring studies found supporting neural evidence for mindset-related differences, they may have been confounded by overlapping stimulus processing. We therefore investigated the relationship between mindset and event-related potentials (ERP...

One of the proposed issues underlying reading difficulties in dyslexia is insufficiently automatized letter-speech sound associations. In the current fMRI experiment, we employ text-based recalibration to investigate letter-speech sound mappings in 8-10 year-old children with and without dyslexia. Here an ambiguous speech sound /a?a/ midway between...

Reading skills are usually assessed in silent conditions, but children often experience noisy educational settings. Effects of auditory distraction on children's reading skills remain relatively unexplored. The present study investigates the influence of two features of background speech—intelligibility and loudness—on children's reading speed and...

Predictions of our sensory environment facilitate perception across domains. During speech perception, formal and temporal predictions may be made for phonotactic probability and syllable stress patterns, respectively, contributing to the efficient processing of speech input. The current experiment employed a passive EEG oddball paradigm to probe t...

Statistical learning, or the ability to extract statistical regularities from the sensory environment, plays a critical role in language acquisition. Recent studies have shown that the acquisition of novel word structures can be tracked over time via EEG. Here we track the implicit learning of speech structures in typical and dyslexic readers and i...

There is an ongoing debate whether phonological deficits in dyslexics should be attributed to (1) less specified representations of speech sounds, like suggested by studies in young children with a familial risk for dyslexia, or (2) to an impaired access to these phonemic representations, as suggested by studies in adults with dyslexia. These confl...

Poster presented during the "Capturing Developmental Brain Dynamics" workshop in Leiden, 2019.

Poster presented during the "Capturing Developmental Brain Dynamics" workshop in Leiden, 2019.

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...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders, with high impact on school and psychosocial development and high comorbidity with conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, and anxiety. DD is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including word reading, spelling, rapi...

One of the proposed mechanisms underlying reading difficulties observed in developmental dyslexia is impaired mapping of visual to auditory speech representations. We investigate these mappings in 20 typically reading and 20 children with dyslexia aged 8–10 years using text-based recalibration. In this paradigm, the pairing of visual text and ambig...

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...

Upon hearing an ambiguous speech sound, listeners may adjust their perceptual interpretation of the speech input in accordance with contextual information, like accompanying text or lipread speech (i.e., phonetic recalibration; Bertelson et al., 2003). As developmental dyslexia (DD) has been associated with reduced integration of text and speech so...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders among children and is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including reading, spelling, short term memory and others. To help unravel the genetic basis of these skills, we conducted a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS), including nine cohorts of readin...

Learning to read requires the formation of efficient neural associations between written and spoken language. Whether these associations influence the auditory cortical representation of speech remains unknown. Here we address this question by combining multivariate functional MRI analysis and a newly-developed ‘text-based recalibration’ paradigm....

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...

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...

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...

Development typically leads to optimized and adaptive neural mechanisms for the processing of voice and speech. In this fMRI study we investigated how this adaptive processing reaches its mature efficiency by examining the effects of task, age and phonological skills on cortical responses to voice and speech in children (8–9 years), adolescents (14...

Listeners adjust their phonetic categories to cope with variations in the speech signal (phonetic recalibration). Previous studies have shown that lipread speech (and word knowledge) can adjust the perception of ambiguous speech and can induce phonetic adjustments (Bertelson, Vroomen, & de Gelder in Psychological Science, 14(6), 592-597, 2003; Norr...

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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Unlabelled: The brain's circuitry for perceiving and producing speech may show a notable level of overlap that is crucial for normal development and behavior. The extent to which sensorimotor integration plays a role in speech perception remains highly controversial, however. Methodological constraints related to experimental designs and analysis...

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...

Audition is central in our life. It is crucial to interpersonal communication and social relations. It also provides us with vital and unique information for interacting optimally with the environment.

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...

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

Spoken word recognition and production require fast transformations between acoustic, phonological, and conceptual neural representations. Bilinguals perform these transformations in native and non-native languages, deriving unified semantic concepts from equivalent, but acoustically different words. Here we exploit this capacity of bilinguals to i...

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...

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

Selective attention to relevant sound properties is essential for everyday listening situations. It enables the formation of different perceptual representations of the same acoustic input and is at the basis of flexible and goal-dependent behavior. Here, we investigated the role of the human auditory cortex in forming behavior-dependent representa...

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...

Bilinguals derive the same semantic concepts from equivalent, but acoustically different, words in their first and second languages. The neural mechanisms underlying the representation of language-independent concepts in the brain remain unclear. Here, we measured fMRI in human bilingual listeners and reveal that response patterns to individual spo...

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...

The premise of cognitive therapy is that one can overcome the irresistible temptation of highly palatable foods by actively restructuring the way one thinks about food. Testing this idea, participants in the present study were instructed to passively view foods, up-regulate food palatability thoughts, apply cognitive reappraisal (e.g., thinking abo...

Pattern recognition algorithms are becoming increasingly used in functional neuroimaging. These algorithms exploit information contained in temporal, spatial, or spatio-temporal patterns of independent variables (features) to detect subtle but reliable differences between brain responses to external stimuli or internal brain states. When applied to...

There is an increasing interest to integrate electrophysiological and hemodynamic measures for characterizing spatial and temporal aspects of cortical processing. However, an informative combination of responses that have markedly different sensitivities to the underlying neural activity is not straightforward, especially in complex cognitive tasks...

Constructive mechanisms in the auditory system may restore a fragmented sound when a gap in this sound is rendered inaudible by noise to yield a continuity illusion. Using combined psychoacoustic and electroencephalography experiments in humans, we found that the sensory-perceptual mechanisms that enable restoration suppress auditory cortical encod...

Speech and vocal sounds are at the core of human communication. Cortical processing of these sounds critically depends on behavioral demands. However, the neurocomputational mechanisms enabling this adaptive processing remain elusive. Here we examine the task-dependent reorganization of electroencephalographic responses to natural speech sounds (vo...

In transparent alphabetic languages, the expected standard for complete acquisition of letter–speech sound associations is within one year of reading instruction. The neural mechanisms underlying the acquisition of letter–speech sound associations have, however, hardly been investigated. The present article describes an ERP study with beginner and...

Can we decipher speech content ("what" is being said) and speaker identity ("who" is saying it) from observations of brain activity of a listener? Here, we combine functional magnetic resonance imaging with a data-mining algorithm and retrieve what and whom a person is listening to from the neural fingerprints that speech and voice signals elicit i...

Research indicates that dysfunctional food reward processing may contribute to pathological eating behaviour. It is widely recognized that both the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are essential parts of the brain's reward circuitry. The aims of this fMRI study were (1) to examine the effects of food deprivation and calorie content on re...

Recently brain imaging evidence indicated that letter/speech-sound integration, necessary for establishing fluent reading, takes place in auditory association areas and that the integration is influenced by stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the letter and the speech-sound. In the present study, we used a specific ERP measure known for its aut...

Developmental dyslexia is strongly associated with a phonological deficit. Yet, implicit phonological processing (in)capacities in dyslexia remain relatively unexplored. Here we use a neurophysiological response sensitive to experience-dependent auditory memory traces, the mismatch negativity (MMN), to investigate implicit phonological processing o...