Knockdown of Dyslexia-Gene Dcdc2 Interferes with Speech Sound Discrimination in Continuous Streams
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Centanni-2016-Knockdown of Dyslexi.pdf
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Author(s)
Booker, A. B.
Chen, F.
Sloan, A. M.
Carraway, R. S.
Rennaker, R. L.
LoTurco, J. J.
Kilgard, M. P.
Centanni, Tracy M
Date Issued
April 2016
Journal
Journal of Neuroscience
Publisher
Society for Neuroscience
Citation
Centanni, T. M. et al. “Knockdown of Dyslexia-Gene Dcdc2 Interferes with Speech Sound Discrimination in Continuous Streams.” Journal of Neuroscience 36.17 (2016): 4895–4906.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Dyslexia is the most common developmental language disorder and is marked by deficits in reading and phonological awareness. One
theory of dyslexia suggests that the phonological awareness deficit is due to abnormal auditory processing of speech sounds. Variants in
DCDC2 and several other neural migration genes are associated with dyslexia and may contribute to auditory processing deficits. In the
current study, wetestedthe hypothesisthat RNAi suppression of Dcdc2 in rats causes abnormal cortical responsesto sound and impaired
speech sound discrimination. In the current study, rats were subjected in utero to RNA interference targeting of the gene Dcdc2 or a
scrambled sequence. Primary auditory cortex (A1) responseswere acquiredfrom 11 rats (5withDcdc2RNAi; DC) before any behavioral
training. A separate group of 8 rats (3 DC)weretrained on a variety of speech sound discriminationtasks, and auditory cortex responses
were acquired following training. Dcdc2 RNAi nearly eliminated the ability of rats to identify specific speech sounds from a continuous
train of speech sounds but did not impair performance during discrimination of isolated speech sounds. The neural responses to speech
sounds in A1 were not degraded as a function of presentation rate before training. These results suggest that A1 is not directly involved in
the impaired speech discrimination caused by Dcdc2 RNAi. This result contrasts earlier results using Kiaa0319 RNAi and suggests that
different dyslexia genes may cause different deficits in the speech processing circuitry, which may explain differential responses to
therapy.
MIT Department
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.4202-15.2016
