Comorbidity and cognitive overlap between developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia

Manon Couvignou , Isabelle Peretz (1) , Franck Ramus (2)

1 Département de Psychologie
2 LSCP - Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique

This study investigated whether there is a co-occurrence between developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia in adults. First, a database of online musical tests on 18,000 participants was analysed. Self-reported dyslexic participants performed significantly lower on melodic skills than matched controls, suggesting a possible link between reading and musical disorders. In order to test this relationship more directly, we evaluated 20 participants diagnosed with dyslexia, 16 participants diagnosed with amusia, and their matched controls, with a whole battery of literacy (reading, fluency, spelling), phonological (verbal working memory, phonological awareness) and musical tests (melody, rhythm and metre perception, incidental memory). Amusia was diagnosed in six (30%) dyslexic participants and reading difficulties were found in four (25%) amusic participants. Thus, the results point to a moderate comorbidity between amusia and dyslexia. Further research will be needed to determine what factors at the neural and/or cognitive levels are responsible for this co-occurrence. ARTICLE HISTORY

http://www.lscp.net/persons/ramus/docs/CogNeuro19.pdf

Mots clés: Developmental dyslexia; congenital amusia; literacy; phonology; music perception

Domaines: Sciences cognitives

Manon Couvignou, Isabelle Peretz, Franck Ramus. Comorbidity and cognitive overlap between developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2019, 36 (1-2), pp.1-17. ⟨10.1080/02643294.2019.1578205⟩. ⟨hal-02158506⟩