Garcia-de-Soria, M. C. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2025

Benefits of Music Training for Learning to Read: Evidence from Cortical Tracking of Speech in Children

Musical training has long been argued to boost early phonological and reading abilities. Cortical tracking of speech (CTS) has been proposed as a mechanism for this music-to-literacy transfer. In this study, we examined how musical training shapes CTS in young readers and whether it facilitates literacy benefits. In a sample of 57 children aged 5-9, musical training was linked to enhanced reading and phonological awareness (PA). EEG during story listening revealed that higher left-hemispheric and lower right-hemispheric CTS were also associated with higher reading scores. However, children with higher musicality exhibited stronger reading skills at lower levels of left-hemispheric CTS, suggesting more adult-like speech analysis. Critically, PA mediated the relationship between musicality and reading: greater musicality was associated with stronger PA, which in turn predicted higher reading performance, independent of demographic and cognitive factors. These findings indicate that musical training supports literacy by enhancing PA and shaping left-lateralized speech processing.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

ASAP: An automatic sustained attention prediction method for infants and toddlers using wearable device signals

Sustained attention (SA) is a critical cognitive ability that emerges in infancy. The recent development of wearable technology for infants enables the collection of large-scale multimodal data in the natural environment, including physiological signals. To capitalize on these new technologies, psychologists need methods to efficiently extract valid and robust SA measures from large datasets. In this study, we present an innovative automatic sustained attention prediction (ASAP) method that harnesses electrocardiogram (ECG) and accelerometer (Acc) signals recorded with wearable sensors from 75 infants (6-, 9-, 12-, 24- and 36-months). Infants undertook various naturalistic tasks similar to those encountered in their natural environment, including free play with their caregivers. Annotated SA was validated by fixation signals from eye-tracking. ASAP was trained on temporal and spectral features derived from the ECG and Acc signals to detect attention periods, and tested against human-coded SA. ASAPs performance is similar across all age groups, demonstrating its suitability for studying development. We also investigated the relationship between attention periods and low-level perceptual features (visual saliency, visual clutter) extracted from the egocentric videos recorded during caregiver-infant free play. Saliency increased during attention vs inattention periods and decreased with age for attention (but not inattention) periods. Crucially, there was no observable difference in results from ASAP attention detection relative to the human-coded attention. Our results demonstrate that ASAP is a powerful tool for detecting infant SA elicited in natural environments. Alongside the available wearable sensors, ASAP provides unprecedented opportunities for studying infant development in the wild.

neuroscience↗