Comorbidity and cognitive overlap between developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental dyslexia
• congenital amusia
• literacy
• phonology
• music perception

Acknowledgements

We thank all the participants and we thank Sanaa Moukawane and Mihaela Felezeu for their help in diagnostic testing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Manon Couvignou http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6652-5286

Isabelle Peretz http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3572-0262

Franck Ramus http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1122-5913

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agence Nationale de la Recherche [contracts ANR-11-BSV4-014-01, ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC, ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*] and by grants from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.