Fine motor control in using pen for writing and copying: in the impaired and healthy brain

The central issue of the dissertation is to investigate the neural-cognitive basis of writing and copying figures focusing on fine motor abilities. The neuronal recycling hypothesis is used as the theoretical framework, assuming that the ability to use pen emerged from other closely related cognitive abilities. The thesis contained four independent studies with either ischemic stroke patients or healthy participants. Chapter 2 describe the general methods used in our study. Chapter 3 is a neuropsychological study that utilizes principle component analysis and voxel-based morphometry. It explores the neural-cognitive basis underlying complex figure copying (CFC). It demonstrates the involvement of different processing stages that supports figure copying along the dorsal pathway, from visual through eye-hand coordination to the motor associative cortex. Chapters 4-6 focus on writing abilities, across two different systems: phonological and logographic. Chapter 4, is a neuropsychological study that utilized machine learning to explore the latent relationship between writing with other cognitive tasks in English and Chinese. Across the two-writing systems impairment in writing skills could be reliably classified using the same features. These cognitive features were related to CFC, attention, reading, memory and age. Chapter 5 presents two neuropsychological studies that examine the neuro-cognitive makeup of the ability to write words (phonological) and numbers (logographic). The first study is a detail comorbidity analysis of writing deficits of words, numbers, language and motor deficits. It demonstrates that pure writing deficits are very rare, with the majority of writing deficits overlapping with motor (CFC) or language impairments. The second study in this chapter is a VBM study focus on writing numbers and words. We identified two dissociable networks that have been specifically evolved to support writing: a visual-manual motor ability to use pen mediated by right angular and middle frontal gyri; and an ability to transform symbolic representations grapheme to manual programs for use with the pen. Chapter 6 is an fMRI study with healthy participants investigating the neural substrates associated with writing English, Chinese and Pinyin. The study identifies different brain networks that support writing abilities across writing systems: visual information perception and visual motor transformation, semantic component. Chapter 7, summarize and compare the main finding of the four studies. Overall, the studies demonstrate the close relations between the sue of pen and other more basic cognitive functions, such as control of hand movement, language, attention. As predicted by the neuronal recycling hypothesis there were minimal pure deficits of writing or copying; and for proficient writers, the same neural structures supported different writing systems

Relationship between early development of spelling and reading

The research reported in this thesis examined the relationship between beginning spelling and reading. More specifically, it focussed on the relationship between the development of early reading and spelling in a context where the approach to early reading instruction includes systematic phonological awareness and decoding instruction. A critical assumption made by proponents of developmental early literacy models is that transfer of skills and knowledge from reading to spelling will occur spontaneously and without formal instruction (Frith, 1980). By contrast instruction-centred approaches make the assumption that there are critical pre-requisite skills that can and should be taught explicitly (Carnine, Silbert & Kameenui, 1997). The difference between these approaches is highlighted in the treatment of invented spelling, a popular activity in Western Australian junior primary classes. A series of studies was undertaken to examine the effect on invented and standard spelling performance of teaching Year 1 children phonological awareness and the strategy of sounding out words. Data were gathered from a range of settings using different research tools. The relationship between phonological awareness and beginning reading and spelling performance was explored initially through a single case study. A post-hoc study was then undertaken with a cohort of students who had received systematic decoding instruction to examine whether proficiency in the decoding of nonwords was related to spelling performance. This permitted an analysis of common sub-skills of decoding and encoding. In the main study the effect on different aspects of reading and spelling performance of using Let\u27s Decode, an approach that includes explicit phonological awareness and systematic decoding instruction, was investigated. In addition, an analysis was made of whether students who received explicit instruction in skills known to contribute to beginning reading and spelling produced superior invented spelling samples. A qualitative analysis was made of the. pre and post invented spelling tests of two pairs of students from the control and intervention groups matched on invented spelling and phonological awareness skills at the beginning of the year, and re tested at the end of Year 1. The final research question involved a single-subject research design to examine the effect of explicit instruction in isolating phonemes in words and prompts to \u27listen for sounds\u27 prior to, and during, the process of spelling words. The single case study revealed a child who was regarded as a competent speller and reader but who could only read words in a familiar context and who had developed a strategy for spelling words based on copying an adult model. This was interpreted as evidence supporting the need for phonological awareness instruction as a pre-requisite for spelling. The post-hoc analysis of a class of students who had received systematic decoding instruction showed that no student classified as a \u27good decoder\u27 could also be classified as a \u27poor speller\u27. This result was considered evidence of a strong link between the phonological knowledge that is required to decode and the role of alphabetic knowledge in spelling. The main study revealed phonological awareness and systematic decoding instruction was associated with superior invented and conventional spelling and reading performance on all reading and spelling measures. Of particular importance was the finding that students who commenced the study with very weak phonological awareness and who subsequently received systematic phonological and decoding instruction showed greater gains in invented spelling than matched students in the control condition. The single subject design showed the effectiveness of phonological awareness individualised instruction on invented spelling for weak students from both intervention and control conditions. It was concluded that the ability to invent spelling is improved when students receive explicit instruction in phonological awareness and systematic decoding but that some students, namely those with persistent weakness in phonological awareness, also require explicit prompts to apply their alphabetic knowledge to spelling words. The implications for instruction of these findings are discussed

A cross-linguistic investigation of reading behaviour between a consistent and an inconsistent orthography: An eye-tracking experiment

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonAccording to the Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1991), all variation in reading can be accounted for by two component skills; decoding and language comprehension. However, these skills also need to be considered in the context of orthography. Languages differ considerably in terms of their orthographic structure; inconsistent orthographies have an inconsistent grapheme-phoneme conversion, like that of English, and consistent orthographies consist of a consistent conversion, like that of Italian or Spanish. The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (Katz & Frost, 1992) claims that efficient reading requires readers to adapt reading strategies to meet the demands of the orthography being read. Languages with varying depths of orthographies may require distinct reading strategies that drive the development of specific reading skills and may affect a bilingual’s ability to efficiently comprehend texts in languages of varying orthographic depths. Further, inconsistent orthographies may place higher demands on word reading than consistent orthographies. According to the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency (Wydell & Butterworth, 1999), orthography can be broken down into two main features that may be responsible for incidences of phonological dyslexia; ‘transparency’ and ‘granularity’. The HGT argues that transparent languages will yield fewer instances of phonological dyslexia than opaque orthographies. However, even in opaque orthographies, if the smallest graphemic unit representing sound is equal to a whole character or a whole word (i.e., coarse grain), as opposed to a syllable or phoneme (i.e., fine grain), it will not produce a high prevalence of phonological dyslexia. English dyslexics are known to have poor decoding skills, which may cause them to engage in compensatory eye-movement patterns during reading. The current experiment used eye-tracking techniques to compare reading strategies in three groups: native-English monolingual readers with and without developmental dyslexia (DD) and Spanish-English bilinguals reading in both their native and second language

Legibility of Musical Scores and Parallels with Language Reading

Following on the extensive literature within experimental psychology on the reading of natural language texts, I have undertaken a series of experiments on the sight-reading of musical scores that have shown that spacing of information, the structuring of the musical discourse, and the predictability of design in a score can aid its legibility in a manner similar to what has been shown in the language domain. Cultural studies of reading —particularly the works of Saenger— point in the same direction; according to these, the change in Medieval textual scripts from scriptura continua at the beginning of the eight century to the adoption of canonical separations between words, phrases, or paragraphs (which had fully spread throughout Europe by the mid-fourteenth century) significantly decreased the cognitive load and time that had previously been needed to decode a script. Crucially, this eliminated the need for the ancient techniques of the praelectio (initial decoding of the text by reading it aloud) and rote repetition for its comprehension, triggering a whole new culture of private fluent reading. Equally, the literature on music sight-reading (although lacking in systematic research based on objective measurements of legibility of texts) has proposed, based on surveys and studies of expertise, a series of cognitive models of the activity that prime, as factors that distinguish proficient readers from beginners: the integration of discursive elements into higher-order meaning units, the ability to predict upcoming information, and the awareness of the structuring of the text. The experiments reported here compared readings using conventional scores with readings using novel scores where the suggested advantages of information separation, integration and predictability were implemented in the design. Fluency of performance was measured primarily in terms of numbers of mistakes, results showing that readers played more accurately with the novel scores. Other, more qualitative, measurements —such as spectrogram coding of tempo stability, blind expert judgment of performance quality, and participant self-assessments— all showed strong positive correlations with the measurements of numbers of mistakes, with the novel scores producing performances that were more fluent and ranked as more trustworthy and musically satisfactory by experts and readers alike. These results will still need to be extrapolated to many other musical practices, but they serve to open a debate on the conventions of music publishing as they stand, and are well placed to open new lines of research in score legibility and design.Cambridge Home and EU Scholarship Scheme (CHESS