Present and past: Can writing abilities in school children be associated with their auditory discrimination capacities in infancy?
Weak infant auditory brain responses forecast later writing problems, giving clinicians an early red flag.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Schaadt et al. (2015) followed a mixed group of babies from age 5 months to early elementary school. At 5 months each baby listened to tone pairs while the team recorded brain waves. Years later the same children completed writing tasks in school.
The researchers asked a simple question: do babies who later struggle with writing already show weaker auditory discrimination?
What they found
Children who later had writing problems already showed smaller mismatch brain responses at 5 months. The weaker the infant brain reaction, the worse the later writing scores.
In plain words, writing trouble can be glimpsed in the baby brain long before pencil meets paper.
How this fits with other research
Anthony et al. (2020) and Dwyer et al. (2023) saw the same weak auditory brain reactions in autistic children, linking them to everyday sound sensitivity. Gesa’s babies were not selected for autism, yet the brain marker looks similar.
Stanutz et al. (2014) flips the picture: autistic school-age kids actually outperformed peers on pitch tasks. Together these studies show auditory differences in autism are complex—some tasks hurt, some help.
Cramm et al. (2009) found early auditory brain-stem differences in Down syndrome newborns. Add Gesa’s data and a pattern emerges: multiple developmental routes can start with atypical infant hearing.
Why it matters
If you assess a baby or toddler today, watch how their brain reacts to sound. A low-cost ERP screen could flag future writing risk before the child speaks a word. For school-age clients, pair writing interventions with auditory discrimination drills—strengthen the ear to boost the pencil.
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Add a quick auditory oddball game to your writing intervention—have the child raise a hand each time a target sound changes.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Literacy acquisition is highly associated with auditory processing abilities, such as auditory discrimination. The event-related potential Mismatch Response (MMR) is an indicator for cortical auditory discrimination abilities and it has been found to be reduced in individuals with reading and writing impairments and also in infants at risk for these impairments. The goal of the present study was to analyze the relationship between auditory speech discrimination in infancy and writing abilities at school age within subjects, and to determine when auditory speech discrimination differences, relevant for later writing abilities, start to develop. We analyzed the MMR registered in response to natural syllables in German children with and without writing problems at two points during development, that is, at school age and at infancy, namely at age 1 month and 5 months. We observed MMR related auditory discrimination differences between infants with and without later writing problems, starting to develop at age 5 months-an age when infants begin to establish language-specific phoneme representations. At school age, these children with and without writing problems also showed auditory discrimination differences, reflected in the MMR, confirming a relationship between writing and auditory speech processing skills. Thus, writing problems at school age are, at least, partly grounded in auditory discrimination problems developing already during the first months of life.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2015 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2015.10.002