"Art as Experience" revisited: Dewey's aesthetic cognition theory in the age of fragmented perception.

Dyslexia is a developmental disorder characterised by impairments in reading, writing, and spelling, primarily attributed to a core difficulty in phonological processing (; ). This “phonological deficit” is characterised by difficulties in recognising, memorising, and manipulating sounds in words, which are essential precursor skills for learning to read (). Affecting approximately 5–10% of the population (), dyslexia is not associated with impaired general intelligence, reasoning, and intellectual abilities, but poses substantial challenges in academic environments and daily life (). A central aspect of the phonological difficulties is poor phonological awareness, defined as the capacity to recognise and manipulate oral units such as syllable stress patterns, syllables, onset-rimes, and phonemes within spoken language (). These challenges likely arise from atypical neural processing within brain regions critical for language and auditory functions, and may involve neural oscillatory systems (; ; ). The temporal sampling (TS) theory (, , ) proposes that dyslexia is characterised by deficits in accurately processing slower temporal characteristics of speech sounds, with frequencies below 10 Hz, primarily affecting the delta and theta oscillatory networks. Specifically, TS theory suggests that individuals with dyslexia struggle to perceive and process the precise timing and patterns of amplitude modulation associated with syllabic structures, the parsing of which is related to slower rates of temporal modulation. In contrast, other theories focus on rapid processing deficits in temporal windows corresponding to frequencies in gamma-band oscillatory networks (; ), although atypical responses have also been reported in people with dyslexia at frequencies around 20 Hz, within the beta range (). Tallal’s Rapid Auditory Processing (RAP) theory and the “phonemic oversampling” proposed by focus on phoneme-level structures, which are related to faster rates of temporal modulation. However, given the mechanistic hierarchical nesting between slow (theta) and fast (gamma) oscillatory rates in auditory cortex (), it is possible that atypical low-frequency temporal sampling may subsequently result in altered fast-rate activity. Any level of impaired temporal processing is assumed to hinder the development of phonological awareness in infancy and childhood, complicating subsequent learning of the mapping between written letters and their corresponding sounds. Importantly, these theoretical perspectives raise a broader question regarding the nature of temporal sampling deficits in dyslexia: whether such deficits are specific to slow frequency processing, specific to faster frequency processing, or reflect a more general disruption of hierarchical temporal organisation across multiple frequency bands. To address this gap, the current study adopts a multi-level approach, combining several complementary neural measures. Phase entrainment provides a direct index of the alignment of neural oscillations to rhythmic input and constitutes the core mechanism proposed by the TS framework. Band-power analyses quantify the magnitude of oscillatory activity within each frequency band, offering complementary information about the strength of neural engagement at different temporal scales. Cross-frequency coupling measures (phase–amplitude coupling [PAC] and phase–phase coupling [PPC]) index the coordination between oscillatory processes operating at different temporal scales, reflecting the hierarchical organisation of neural processing. Together, these measures allow us to test whether dyslexia reflects frequency-specific impairments, broadband temporal sampling disruption, or altered coordination across neural timescales. Neural phase entrainment has been studied intensively in dyslexia, as it is one of the mechanisms that enables the brain to align temporally with external rhythmic stimuli, thus facilitating efficient processing of rhythmic information (). In the rhythmic syllable repetition task, children with dyslexia exhibit atypical phase entrainment in both the delta and beta frequency bands (; ; ). Prior studies of neural entrainment in adults have utilised non-speech rhythmic stimuli, most typically amplitude-modulated (AM) noise (; ; ; ). However, they have either not measured oscillations in the delta band (~2 Hz, ), or have not measured oscillations in both the delta and theta bands (modulations <10 Hz, ; ; ). Using AM white noise, reported reduced Auditory Steady State Response (ASSR) power to AM with rates from 20 to 80 Hz for dyslexic adults compared with controls. measured ASSR power for AM rates of 10, 20, 40, 80, and 160 Hz and reported that the ASSR power was lower for dyslexic readers than for controls for all AM rates. However, both these studies used only a single electrode. used a white noise stimulus with a range of AM rates (10–80 Hz), which they argued broadly covered the phonemic sampling domain. Using mag