Neural and Behavioral Foundations of Emerging Literacy

Learning to read transforms the mind and brain as children learn to recognize language in its printed form. This dissertation asks, how does spoken language processing support reading development? This inquiry is centered around theoretical frameworks that suggest that skilled reading depends on closely connected representations of sound, print, and meaning. In three separate studies, I explore the neurocognitive basis of reading development and its relation to spoken language processing, with a particular focus on children’s sensitivity to units of meaning in language. First, I examine the interrelation between spoken and written word processing in the brain of 133 5–6-year-old kindergarteners, 68 of whom participated in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). This first study reveals that children’s emerging neural architecture for a shared print-speech network is best explained by their spoken language proficiency, and that the extent of this shared network in kindergarten predicts reading skill one year later. Next, I examine the role of morphological awareness, or children’s sensitivity to units of meaning, in a large, linguistically diverse sample of 340 monolingual and bilingual children, ages 5–9. Using a novel behavioral measure of morphological awareness, as well as standardized behavioral language and literacy assessments, I reveal that morphological awareness makes a robust independent contribution to early literacy skill, and that this association varies as a function of children’s bilingual language backgrounds. Finally, I use functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) neuroimaging to investigate the brain basis of morphological awareness and its relation to successful reading comprehension in 97 6–11-year-olds, 25% of whom were reading impaired. I find that during a morphological awareness task, better readers demonstrate increased engagement of brain regions associated with integrating units of sound, meaning, and print, while impaired readers fail to show this association. Taken together, these dissertation findings suggest that children’s language ability is a core mechanism guiding the neural plasticity for learning to read, and inform theoretical perspectives on the role of morphology in the reading development of diverse learners.PHDEducation & PsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169647/1/marksre_1.pd

Neurobiological signatures of L2 proficiency: Evidence from a bi-directional cross-linguistic study

Available online 12 November 2018Recent evidence has shown that convergence of print and speech processing across a network of primarily left-hemisphere regions of the brain is a predictor of future reading skills in children, and a marker of fluent reading ability in adults. The present study extends these findings into the domain of second-language (L2) literacy, through brain imaging data of English and Hebrew L2 learners. Participants received an fMRI brain scan, while performing a semantic judgement task on spoken and written words and pseudowords in both their L1 and L2, alongside a battery of L1 and L2 behavioural measures. Imaging results show, overall, a similar network of activation for reading across the two languages, alongside significant convergence of print and speech processing across a network of left-hemisphere regions in both L1 and L2 and in both cohorts. Importantly, convergence is greater for L1 in occipito-temporal regions tied to automatic skilled reading processes including the visual word-form area, but greater for L2 in frontal regions of the reading network, tied to more effortful, active processing. The main groupwise brain effects tell a similar story, with greater L2 than L1 activation across frontal, temporal and parietal regions, but greater L1 than L2 activation in parieto-occipital regions tied to automatic mapping processes in skilled reading. These results provide evidence for the shifting of the reading networks towards more automatic processing as reading proficiency rises and the mappings and statistics of the new orthography are learned and incorporated into the reading system.This paper was supported by the ERC Advanced grant awarded to Ram Frost (project 692502), the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 217/14 awarded to Ram Frost), and by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health (RO1 HD 067364 awarded to Ken Pugh and Ram Frost, and PO1 HD 01994 awarded to Jay Rueckl)

Neural Plasticity of Language Systems: evidence from fMRI experiments with adult language learners

216 p.Functional specialisation and plasticity are fundamental organising principles of the brain. Language is a uniquely human phenomenon that requires a delicate balance between neural specialisation and plasticity, and language learning offers the perfect window to study these principles in the human brain. Though the human brain exhibits a remarkable ability to support a variety of languages that may be acquired at different points in the life span, the capacity for neural reorganisation decreases with age. Further, language is a complex construct involving linguistic as well as visual, auditory, and motor processes. The current doctoral thesis asked two main questions: (1) Do large-scale functional changes accompany language learning in adulthood? and (2) Are these neural changes similar across different language systems such as reading, speech comprehension, and verbal production? These questions were investigated in three fMRI experiments with adult language learners. In Experiments I and II, comprehension and production were examined in 30-to-60-year-old intermediate and advanced language learners and functional learning-related changes in each modality were comprehensively characterised. In Experiment III, hemispheric lateralisation of reading, speech comprehension, and verbal production were compared and contrasted, and the analyses were extended to a second longitudinal study with a contrasting participant sample. Robust evidence was found for significant functional plasticity well into adulthood, and results showed that different language systems exhibited different patterns of hemispheric specialisation and plasticity. The results have theoretical and practical implications for our understanding of fundamental principles of neural organisation of language, language learning in healthy populations, and language testing and recovery in patients

Developmental Trajectories of Letter and Speech Sound Integration During Reading Acquisition

Reading acquisition in alphabetic languages starts with learning the associations between speech sounds and letters. This learning process is related to crucial developmental changes of brain regions that serve visual, auditory, multisensory integration, and higher cognitive processes. Here, we studied the development of audiovisual processing and integration of letter-speech sound pairs with an audiovisual target detection functional MRI paradigm. Using a longitudinal approach, we tested children with varying reading outcomes before the start of reading acquisition (T1, 6.5 yo), in first grade (T2, 7.5 yo), and in second grade (T3, 8.5 yo). Early audiovisual integration effects were characterized by higher activation for incongruent than congruent letter-speech sound pairs in the inferior frontal gyrus and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Audiovisual processing in the left superior temporal gyrus significantly increased from the prereading (T1) to early reading stages (T2, T3). Region of interest analyses revealed that activation in left superior temporal gyrus (STG), inferior frontal gyrus and ventral occipitotemporal cortex increased in children with typical reading fluency skills, while poor readers did not show the same development in these regions. The incongruency effect bilaterally in parts of the STG and insular cortex at T1 was significantly associated with reading fluency skills at T3. These findings provide new insights into the development of the brain circuitry involved in audiovisual processing of letters, the building blocks of words, and reveal early markers of audiovisual integration that may be predictive of reading outcomes

The Predictive Ability of Early Reading Indicators and Spelling on Oral Reading Fluency

The purpose of this quantitative, predictive correlational study was to explore the predictive ability of beginning of the year scores of Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF), Oral Reading Fluency (ORF), and scores from a Primary Spelling Inventory (PSI) at mid-year ORF scores for second-grade students in a rural school district in central Pennsylvania. Because reading skills are strongly linked to positive academic and life outcomes, the identification of students who may have reading difficulties is a critical task for schools. Alphabetic and orthographic knowledge is central to reading development and essential for educators to understand the reading aptitude of students. This study included a convenience sample of 124 second-grade participants from two elementary schools in rural Pennsylvania. A linear multiple regression analysis was used to determine how accurately can ORF scores can be predicted from a linear combination of scores from the beginning of the year reading and spelling benchmarks. The null hypothesis was tested and rejected at the 95% confidence level, where F(3, 120) = 327.12 and p \u3c .001. There was a significant relationship between the combination of predictor variables and the criterion variable. Approximately 89% of the variance of the criterion variable can be explained by the linear combination of predictor variables. Only beginning of the year ORF was found to significantly predict mid-year ORF scores (p \u3c .001). Limitations, implications, and directions for future research are discussed

The Relationship between Language and Reading in Bilingual English-Arabic Children

ABSTRACT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND READING IN BILINGUAL ENGLISH-ARABIC CHILDREN by Lama K. Farran This dissertation examined the relationship between language and reading in bilingual English-Arabic children. The dissertation followed a two chapter Review and Research Format. Chapter One presents a review of research that examined the relationship between oral language and reading development in bilingual English-Arabic children. Chapter Two describes the study that examined this same relationship. Participants were 83 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade children who attended a charter school in a large school district in the Southeastern portion of the US. The school taught Arabic as a second language daily in the primary and elementary grades. This cross-sectional quantitative study used norm-referenced assessments and experimental measures. Data were analyzed using simultaneous and hierarchical regression to identify language predictors of reading. Analysis of covariance was used to examine whether the language groups differed in their Arabic reading comprehension scores, while controlling for age. Results indicated that phonological awareness in Arabic was related to phonological awareness in English. However, morphological awareness in Arabic was not related to morphological awareness in English. Results also revealed that phonological awareness predicted word reading, pseudoword decoding, and complex word reading fluency within Arabic and English; morphological awareness predicted complex word reading fluency in Arabic but not in English; and vocabulary predicted reading comprehension within Arabic and English. Further analyses indicated that children with high vocabulary differed from children with low vocabulary in their reading comprehension scores and that this difference was driven by children’s ability to read unvowelized words. Consistent with the extended version of the Triangle Model of Reading (Bishop & Snowling, 2004), the results suggest a division of labor among various language components in the process of word reading and reading comprehension. Implications for research, instruction, and early intervention with bilingual English-Arabic children are discussed

Converging Evidence for Differential Specialization and Plasticity of Language Systems

First published November 9, 2020.Functional specialization and plasticity are fundamental organizing principles of the brain. Since the mid-1800s, certain cognitive functions have been known to be lateralized, but the provenance and flexibility of hemispheric specialization remain open questions. Language is a uniquely human phenomenon that requires a delicate balance between neural specialization and plasticity, and language learning offers the perfect window to study these principles in the human brain. In the current study, we conducted two separate functional MRI experiments with language learners (male and female), one cross-sectional and one longitudinal, involving distinct populations and languages, and examined hemispheric lateralization and learning-dependent plasticity of the following three language systems: reading, speech comprehension, and verbal production. A multipronged analytic approach revealed a highly consistent pattern of results across the two experiments, showing (1) that in both native and non-native languages, while language production was left lateralized, lateralization for language comprehension was highly variable across individuals; and (2) that with increasing non-native language proficiency, reading and speech comprehension displayed substantial changes in hemispheric dominance, with languages tending to lateralize to opposite hemispheres, while production showed negligible change and remained left lateralized. These convergent results shed light on the long-standing debate of neural organization of language by establishing robust principles of lateralization and plasticity of the main language systems. Findings further suggest involvement of the sensorimotor systems in language lateralization and its plasticity.K.G. eceived support from “la Caixa” Foundation (ID 100010434) through the fellowship LCF/BQ/DI17/11620005 and from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant 713673. J.A.-T. was supported by Basque Government predoctoral Grant PRE_2015_1_028. M.C. was supported by project APCIN-2015-061-MultiLateral, which is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO; Grant FLAG-ERA JTC 2015). P.M.P.-A. was supported by MINECO Grants RYC-2014-15440 and PGC2018-093408-B-I00, and the Neuroscience Research Projects program from the Fundacion Tatiana Perez de Guzman el Bueno. The research was also supported by the Basque Government (Grant BERC 2018–2021) and the Spanish State Research Agency through the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation (Grant SEV-2015-0490)

Modeling Phonological Processing for Children with Mild Intellectual Disabilities: The Relationship between Underlying Phonological Abilities and Associated Language Variables

The structure of phonological processing for typically developing children has been debated over the past two decades. Recent research has indicated that phonological processing is best explained by a single underlying phonological ability (e.g., Anthony and Lonigan, 2004). The current study had two goals. The first goal was to determine the structure of phonological processing for school-age children with mild intellectual disabilities (MID). The second goal was to determine the relationship between the components of phonological processing and expressive and receptive language ability. The participants were 222 school-age children identified by their schools as having MID. Confirmatory factor analysis was utilized to determine the structure of phonological processing. The results indicated that a model with one phonological awareness factor and one naming speed factor explained the data better than competing models with a single latent factor or more than two latent factors. There was a negative significant relationship between phonological processing and naming speed. There were positive bivariate relationships between phonological processing and expressive and receptive language. There were negative bivariate relationships between naming speed and expressive and receptive language. These results are consistent with other research findings with typically developing children, indicating a similarity in the relationships between phonological process and language for children with MID. Theoretical and instructional implications are discussed

Teachers\u27 understandings of phonological awareness

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate teachers\u27 perceptions, knowledge, and teaching practices of phonological awareness. Sixty-four kindergarten and first grade teachers in a rural East Tennessee school district volunteered to participate in the study. The survey instrument was a mailed questionnaire in the form of a two-part written interview. The written interview contained six demographic and general information questions and eight open-ended questions designed to reveal teachers\u27 understandings of phonological awareness and their instructional approaches within the classroom context. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. This study found that most teachers perceive phonological awareness and its constituent skills to involve letter-sound relationships rather than the segmental aspects of oral language. Generally, teachers did not believe phonological awareness to be an essential component of reading instruction; however, approximately one-third of the teachers perceived phonological awareness to be causally related to reading. The conclusions of this study were that most teachers have limited knowledge concerning the meaning of phonological awareness, how it relates to reading acquisition, and of the ways to instruct it in the classroom context. All but a few of the teachers are conducting phonics lessons rather than instructing children to identify and manipulate various segments of speech. It is also evident that many of the teachers in the present study have actively sought information regarding phonological awareness through professional development programs, the Internet, and collaborating with colleagues; thus, it appears that their limited knowledge of phonological awareness is not attributable to their disinterest, but to inadequate sources, which often fail either to clearly differentiate between phonological awareness instruction and phonics instruction, or to deal adequately with the complexity of the construct