Behavioral and neuroimaging research of reading: A case of Japanese

Behavioral studies showed that AS, an English-Japanese bilingual was a skilled reader in Japanese but was a phonological dyslexic in English. This behavioral dissociation was accounted for by the Hypothesis of Transparency and Granularity postulated by Wydell & Butterworth. However, a neuroimaging study using MEG (magnetoencephalography) revealed that AS has the same functional deficit in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG). This paper therefore offers an answer to this intriguing discrepancy between the behavioral dissociation and the neural unity in AS by reviewing existing behavioral and neuroimaging studies in alphabetic languages such as English, Finnish, French, and Italian, and nonalphabetic languages such as Japanese and Chinese

Are phonological skills as crucial for literacy acquisition in Japanese as in English as well as in accounting for developmental dyslexia in English and in Japanese?

Part of a special Issue on dyslexia and cultureCopyright © The Author(s) 2023. Extensive research has shown that phonological awareness including phoneme awareness skills are vital when children acquire literacy skills in alphabetic languages especially in English. Furthermore, research on developmental dyslexia (DD) especially in English has been conducted with research-informed/well-established definitions of DD. This is because compared to other languages, the prevalence of DD in English is high, and thus children with DD form a large minority group. These dyslexia research encompasses cognitive-behavioural, neuroimaging, behavioural and molecular-genetic studies. There seems to be a consensus amongst these researchers that DD manifests itself as a phonological deficit, and thus the phonological deficit hypothesis (as well as naming disfluency) for DD has become prominent in the alphabetic languages, especially in English. This is because print-to-sound or sound-to-print mappings in English are not always one-to-one and thus opaque/inconsistent. Now important questions arise in discussing how children acquire reading skills in non-alphabetic languages especially in Japanese where logographic Kanji and 2-forms of syllabic Kana are used: (i) are phonological awareness skills vital when children learn to read in Japanese? (ii) can the phonological deficit hypothesis explain DD in Japanese? These questions will be addressed in this paper by comparing the behavioural and some neuroimaging studies in alphabetic languages and Japanese Kanji and Kana as well as Chinese, another non-alphabetic languag. It seems that phonological awareness may not be as important for non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese or Japanese at the start of literacy acquisition. Phonological awareness become important skills in Chinese and Japanese only when children are older. Instead of phonological awareness other metalinguistic awareness skills are important for acquisition of reading in Chinese and Japanese such as orthographic or morphological awareness (Chinese), vocabulary size (Japanese), visuo-spatial processing (Chinese and Japanese) and visual-motor integration (Chinese and Japanese) skills. Also available neuroimaging studies will be used to uncover the behavioural dissociation and the neural unity in an English-Japanese bilingual adolescent boy with monolingual dyslexia in English

A Reading Model from the Perspective of Japanese Orthography: Connectionist Approach to the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency

This study presents a computer simulation model of reading in Japanese syllabic Kana and morphographic Kanji. The model was based on the simulation model developed by Harm and Seidenberg (1999) for reading in English. The purpose of building the current model was to verify the validity of the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency (HGT) postulated by Wydell and Butterworth (1999), focusing on the granularity dimension. The HGT was developed in order to explain the behavioral dissociation between excellent reading skills in Japanese and poor reading skills in English of an English-Japanese bilingual individual as well as the relatively low incidence of developmental dyslexia in Japan. The current model was successful in simulating the granularity dimension of the HGT. The study also identified several limitations, which need to be addressed in future research.This work was supported by the JSPS-Kakenhi, Grant No. 19530672, where Mutsuo Ijuin was the PI, while Taeko N. Wydell was one of the CIs

Developmental changes in the role of different metalinguistic awareness skills in Chinese reading acquisition from preschool to third grade

Copyright @ 2014 Wei et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed.National Natural Science Foundation of China and Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Spelling improvement through letter-sound and whole-word training in two multilingual Greek- and English- speaking children

Case studies of two children with spelling difficulty are reported. LK was multilingual and ED bilingual. A training programme that targeted phonic decoding (or sublexical) spelling processes was conducted with both children. Immediate and delayed post-training assessments showed improvement in spelling nonwords for LK but not for ED. Training that targeted whole word (or lexical) spelling processes was then conducted with ED. Improvement in spelling of irregular words (a marker for lexical spelling processes) was observed. Research into literacy difficulties with multilingual children is sparse, although multilingualism is increasingly widespread. Up to now theoretically based training studies have focused on monolingual children and results were promising. The present findings indicate that theoretically based training programmes for literacy difficulties can also be effective for multilingual children

Visual-motor integration and reading Chinese in children with/without dyslexia

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Reading and Writing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-018-9876-zNational Natural Science Foundation of China; Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Imaging Technology; Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology; Chinese Academy of Sciences

Right fronto-temporal activation differs between Chinese first-episode and recurrent Major Depression Disorders during a verbal fluency task: A near-infrared spectroscopy study

Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Major Project [D121100005012004]SCI(E)SSCIARTICLE68-7526