Brain bases of morphological processing in young children

How does the developing brain support the transition from spoken language to print? Two spoken language abilities form the initial base of child literacy across languages: knowledge of language sounds (phonology) and knowledge of the smallest units that carry meaning (morphology). While phonology has received much attention from the field, the brain mechanisms that support morphological competence for learning to read remain largely unknown. In the present study, young English‐speaking children completed an auditory morphological awareness task behaviorally (n = 69, ages 6–12) and in fMRI (n = 16). The data revealed two findings: First, children with better morphological abilities showed greater activation in left temporoparietal regions previously thought to be important for supporting phonological reading skills, suggesting that this region supports multiple language abilities for successful reading acquisition. Second, children showed activation in left frontal regions previously found active in young Chinese readers, suggesting morphological processes for reading acquisition might be similar across languages. These findings offer new insights for developing a comprehensive model of how spoken language abilities support children's reading acquisition across languages. Hum Brain Mapp 36:2890–2900, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112232/1/hbm22815.pd

Neural processes mediating rhyme processing in young children who stutter

The current study investigated the development of phonological awareness and the functional brain activity underlying phonological processing in children who stutter (CWS) and their fluent peers (CWNS) ages 3;9-6;6. In the first part of the current study, we investigated the percent accuracy of 63 children (40 CWS, 23 CWNS) completing a real-word rhyme judgment task. In the second part of the study, we investigated the functional brain activity mediating rhyme judgments, as indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs), in 21 children (12 CWS, 9 CWNS). Part one findings indicated that CWS and CWNS develop rhyme at similar and typical rates. Part two findings demonstrated that both CWS and CWNS show the classic central-parietal N400 rhyme effect; however, the groups differed in the anterior onset rhyme effect. As a group, CWNS showed a left lateralized anterior onset rhyme effect while CWS showed no effect. Analyzing participants individually, CWS showed variable lateralization of this effect. These results support previous findings that the anterior onset rhyme effect differentiates CWS and CWNS and may have implications for identifying CWS who will recover or persist in stuttering. Support for the multifactorial model of stuttering is also discussed

A Picture Is Worth… Both Spelling and Sound

In an event-related potential (ERP) study using picture stimuli, we explored whether spelling information is co-activated with sound information even when neither type of information is explicitly provided. Pairs of picture stimuli presented in a rhyming paradigm were varied by both phonology (the two images in a pair had either rhyming, e.g., boat and goat, or non-rhyming, e.g., boat and cane, labels) and orthography (rhyming image pairs had labels that were either spelled the same, e.g., boat and goat, or not spelled the same, e.g., brain and cane). Electrophysiological picture rhyming (sound) effects were evident in terms of both N400/N450 and late effect amplitude: Non-rhyming images elicited more negative waves than rhyming images. Remarkably, the magnitude of the late ERP rhyming effect was modulated by spelling – even though words were neither explicitly seen nor heard during the task. Moreover, both the N400/N450 and late rhyming effects in the spelled-the-same (orthographically matched) condition were larger in the group with higher scores (by median split) on a standardized measure of sound awareness. Overall, the findings show concomitant meaning (semantic), sound (phonological), and spelling (orthographic) activation for picture processing in a rhyming paradigm, especially in young adults with better reading skills. Not outwardly lexical but nonetheless modulated by reading skill, electrophysiological picture rhyming effects may be useful for exploring co-activation in children with dyslexia

Dislessia Evolutiva e performance di lettura: una proposta di allenamento neurovisivo in condizioni di co-attivazione dei sistemi magno e parvo

Sono molti i disturbi che riguardano la visione, alcuni più espliciti quali i vizi refrattivi, altri impliciti come i DSA. Questo studio si concentra sull’analisi psicofisica dell’ipotesi neurovisiva dei deficit di lettura presentati da soggetti con Dislessia Evolutiva e si propone di dimostrare la validità di un nuovo protocollo riabilitativo sviluppato dal Laboratorio Neurovisus dell’Università di Padova. Tale riabilitazione sfrutta la potenzialità dell’apprendimento percettivo (AP) di potenziare le reti neuronali sulla base della plasticità corticale: si ipotizza che allenando soggetti con DE in un compito di visione della direzione di movimento di uno stimolo mascherato da altri elementi, si possa ottenere un miglioramento sia nella prestazione al compito specifico di discriminazione della direzione di movimento sia nella performance di lettura, abilità che la letteratura ci suggerisce essere intrinsecamente legata alla stessa via neurale coinvolta nell’elaborazione del movimento. Si osserva inoltre come la modulazione delle interazioni laterali a livello di corteccia visiva primaria tramite apprendimento percettivo migliori inoltre la sensibilità al contrasto e l’acuità visiva in soggetti emmetropi o emmetropizzati così come si è verificato per soggetti ametropi o ambliopici

Electrophysiological Correlates of Natural Language Processing in Children and Adults

To understand the causes of differences in language ability we must measure the specific and separable processes that contribute to natural language comprehension. Specifically, we need measures of the three language subsystems – semantics, syntax, and phonology – as they are used during the comprehension of real speech. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) are a promising approach to reaching this level of specificity. Previous research has identified distinct ERP effects for each of the subsystems – the N400 to semantic anomalies, the Anterior Negativity and P600 to syntactic anomalies, and the Phonological Mapping Negativity to unexpected speech sounds. However, these studies typically use stimuli and tasks that encourage processing that differs from real-world language comprehension. Further, previous ERP studies indexing language processing in young children not only use unfamiliar tasks, but also typically exclude data from the large proportion of children. We need to measure language-related ERPs in a context as close as possible to real-world processing, and in a manner that includes data from representative rather than highly-selected samples of children. The experiments described in this dissertation achieve that goal. Adults and five-year-old children listened to a child-directed story while answering comprehension questions. Infrequent violations were included to independently probe the three language subsystems. In children and adults, the canonical N400 response was evident in response to semantic violations. Morphosyntactic violations elicited a long-duration Anterior Negativity without a later P600. Phonological violations on suffixes elicited a Phonological Mapping Negativity in adults. This is the first report of this phonological effect outside of highly-predictable lexical contexts. Popular normed behavioral assessments were also administered to the children who participated in this study. Results from these assessments confirmed that performance on tasks claiming to measure categorically different abilities are correlated with one another, and that language measures correlate with so-called nonverbal measures. ERPs indexing different language subsystem did not correlate with each other or with measures of nonverbal cognitive ability. Using multiple ERP measures during natural language comprehension, we are able to isolate specific aspects of language processing, increasing the possibility of making meaningful connections between biology, experience, and resulting language ability