Brain Mapping and Interpretation of Reading Processing in Children Using EEG and Multivariate Statistical Analysis

Abstract

Difficulties in learning to read may have a number of causes and children tend to experience on the phonological route the most common disturbance in this cognitive task. Using two sample groups of children with and without reading difficulties and their corresponding EEG signals captured during the reading processing, we describe in this work a set of techniques that investigates such disturbance by generating whole brain mappings based on the entropy of each EEG electrode and non-supervised and supervised multivariate statistical analyses. Our experimental results have clearly showed specific neural organizations well suited to interpreting the word/phrase reading processing in these children. We believe that these techniques might become an effective computational tool in helping the diagnostic process of children with learning disabilities.