, 2009, Tallal, 1980 and Vandermosten et al., 2010). Theoretical disagreements stem in a large part from diverging interpretations as to which levels of representation and processing are targeted by related cognitive tests (Ramus, 2001). In the present study, we use a neurophysiological paradigm that circumvents these limitations by relying exclusively on bottom-up cortical responses to passively heard auditory stimuli, thus

tapping into the first steps of auditory cortical integration without calling upon any explicit task. We thereby specifically explore the novel hypothesis that auditory sampling might be altered in dyslexia (Goswami, 2011). We assume that an alteration of fast auditory sampling, reflected in cortical oscillations, would yield phonemic Target Selective Inhibitor Library cell assay representations of an

unusual temporal format, with specific consequences for phonological processing, phoneme/grapheme associations, and phonological memory. While see more cortical oscillations have been implicated in several aspects of human cognition, including sensory feature binding, memory, etc. (Engel et al., 2001), their role in organizing spike timing (Kayser, 2009) could be determinant for sensory sampling (Schroeder et al., 2010 and Van Rullen and Thorpe, 2001) and connected speech parsing (Ghitza, 2011). In auditory cortices, the most prevalent oscillations at rest match rhythmic properties of speech. They are present in the delta/theta and low-gamma bands (Giraud et al., 2007 and Morillon et al., 2010) and hence overlap with the rates of

the strongest modulations in speech envelope, i.e., the syllabic (4 Hz) and phonemic (about 30 Hz) rates, respectively. As theta and low-gamma intrinsic oscillations are amplified by speech, we and others have argued that they could underlie syllabic and phonemic sampling (Abrams et al., 2009, Ghitza and Greenberg, 2009, Giraud et al., 2007, Morillon et al., 2010, Poeppel, 2003 and Shamir those et al., 2009). Auditory cortical oscillations at delta/theta and low-gamma rates are not independent. They usually exhibit nesting properties whereby the phase of delta/theta rhythm drives gamma power (Canolty and Knight, 2010 and Schroeder and Lakatos, 2009). Oscillation nesting could hence be a means by which phonemic and syllabic sampling organize hierarchically, such that information discretized at phonemic rate is integrated at syllabic rate. This mechanism is plausible because cortical oscillations modulate neuronal excitability, yielding interleaved phases of high and low spiking probability at gamma rate, and interleaved phases of low and high gamma power at theta rate (Schroeder et al., 2010). Periodic modulation of spiking is equivalent to information discretization, i.e., an engineering principle through which continuous information is processed over optimal temporal chunks (Xuedong et al., 2001) and forwarded to the next processing step (Roland, 2010).