Search

This study focuses on the role of numerous cognitive skills such as phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), visual and selective attention, auditory skills, and implicit learning in developmental dyslexia. We examined the (co)existence of cognitive deficits in dyslexia and assessed cognitive skills' predictive value for reading. First, we compared school-aged children with severe reading impairment (n = 51) to typical readers (n = 71) to explore the individual patterns of deficits in dyslexia. Children with dyslexia, as a group, presented low PA and RAN scores, as well as limited implicit learning skills. However, we found no differences in the other domains. We found a phonological deficit in 51% and a RAN deficit in 26% of children with dyslexia. These deficits coexisted in 14% of the children. Deficits in other cognitive domains were uncommon and most often coexisted with phonological or RAN deficits. Despite having a severe reading impairment, 26% of children with dyslexia did not present any of the tested deficits. Second, in a group of children presenting a wide range of reading abilities (N = 211), we analysed the relationship between cognitive skills and reading level. PA and RAN were independently related to reading abilities. Other skills did not explain any additional variance. The impact of PA and RAN on reading skills differed. While RAN was a consistent predictor of reading, PA predicted reading abilities particularly well in average and good readers with a smaller impact in poorer readers.

What is the relationship between literacy skills and implicit learning? To address previous mixed findings, we compared school‐aged readers, typical (CON, n = 54) and with dyslexia (DYS, n = 53), in relation to their performance on a serial reaction time task. For the first time, we also included an isolated spelling deficit group (ISD, n = 30) to control for distinctive effects of reading and spelling deficits. A linear reaction times analysis did not reveal between‐group differences in implicit learning. However, further examination revealed that most CON (65%) and ISD (63%) were implicit learners, whereas most DYS were nonlearners (64%). Brain activity showed differences in early learning phases: CON learners and DYS nonlearners activated the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left insula more than other groups. Our findings imply that implicit learning is more frequently disrupted in children with dyslexia than in typical readers, and that activation of the left IFG and insula contributes to effective learning in the latter group but it does not in the former. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in nontechnical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the neural basis of letter and speech sound (LS) integration in 53 typical readers (35 girls, all White) during the first 2 years of reading education (ages 7–9). Changes in both sensory (multisensory vs unisensory) and linguistic (congruent vs incongruent) aspects of LS integration were examined. The left superior temporal cortex and bilateral inferior frontal cortex showed increasing activation for multisensory over unisensory LS over time, driven by reduced activation to speech sounds. No changes were noted in the congruency effect. However, at age nine, heightened activation to incongruent over congruent LS pairs were observed, correlating with individual differences in reading development. This suggests that the incongruency effect evolves at varying rates depending on reading skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews the methods for assessing different components of reading skills in adults with reading difficulties, along with functional reading skills. We are particularly interested in the assessment methods available to researchers and practitioners, developed predominantly in the research context, and not available solely in English. We discuss the large-scale international study, PIAAC, as an example of a framework for such assessments. Furthermore, we cover the following types of assessment tools: (1) self-assessment questionnaires, probing into comprehension difficulties and reading habits; (2) measures of print exposure, such as author recognition tests, correlating with other reading-related skills; (3) measures of word recognition and decoding, including reading aloud of words and pseudowords, as well as silent lexical decision tasks; (4) fill-in-the-blank tasks and sentence reading tasks, measuring predominantly local comprehension, entangled with decoding skills; (5) comprehension of longer reading passages and texts, focusing on functional texts. We discuss comprehension types measured by tests, text types, answer formats, and the dependence problem, i.e., reading comprehension tests that can be solved correctly without reading. Finally, we tap into the new ideas emerging from the AI systems evaluation, e.g., using questions generated from news articles or Wikipedia or asked directly by search engines users. In the concluding section, we comment on the significance of incorporating background information, motivation, and self-efficacy into the assessment of adult literacy skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The left ventral occipitotemporal cortex has been traditionally viewed as a pathway for visual object recognition including written letters and words. Its crucial role in reading was strengthened by the studies on the functionally localized "Visual Word Form Area" responsible for processing word-like information. However, in the past 20 years, empirical studies have challenged the assumptions of this brain region as processing exclusively visual or even orthographic stimuli. In this review, we aimed to present the development of understanding of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex from the visually based letter area to the modality-independent symbolic language related region. We discuss theoretical and empirical research that includes orthographic, phonological, and semantic properties of language. Existing results showed that involvement of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex is not limited to unimodal activity but also includes multimodal processes. The idea of the integrative nature of this region is supported by the broad functional and structural connectivity with language-related and attentional brain networks. We conclude that although the function of the area is not yet fully understood in human cognition, its role goes beyond visual word form processing. The left ventral occipitotemporal cortex seems to be crucial for combining higher-level language information with abstract forms that convey meaning independently of modality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literacy development is a process rather than a single event and thus should be studied at multiple time points. A longitudinal design employing neuroimaging methods offers the possibility to identify neural changes associated with reading development, and to reveal early markers of dyslexia. The core of this review is a summary of findings from longitudinal neuroimaging studies on typical and atypical reading development. Studies focused on the prediction of reading gains with a single neuroimaging time point complement this review. Evidence from structural studies suggests that reading development results in increased structural integrity and functional specialization of left-hemispheric language areas. Compromised integrity of some of these tracts in children at risk for dyslexia might be compensated by higher anatomical connectivity in the homologous right hemisphere tracts. Regarding function, activation in phonological and audiovisual integration areas and growing sensitivity to print in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOT) seem to be relevant neurodevelopmental markers of successful reading acquisition. Atypical vOT responses at the beginning of reading training and infant auditory brain potentials have been proposed as neuroimaging predictors of dyslexia that can complement behavioral measures. Besides these insights, longitudinal neuroimaging studies on reading and dyslexia are still relatively scarce and small sample sizes raise legitimate concerns about the reliability of the results. This review discusses the challenges of these studies and provides recommendations to improve this research area. Future longitudinal research with larger sample sizes are needed to improve our knowledge of typical and atypical reading neurodevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning to read changes the brain language system. Phonological processing is the language domain most crucial for reading, but it is still unknown how reading acquisition modifies the neural phonological network in children who either develop dyslexia or are at risk of dyslexia. For the two first years of formal education, we followed 90 beginning readers with (n = 55) and without (n = 35) familial risk of dyslexia who became typical readers (n = 70) or developed dyslexia (n = 20). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of phonological awareness using an auditory rhyme judgment task. This task was applied when participants were starting formal education, and repeated 2 years later. By applying two alternative group splits, we analyzed the effects of dyslexia and the effects of familial risk of dyslexia separately. We found that the phonological brain network undergoes reorganization during the first 2 years of formal education. This process proceeds differently depending on the presence of a familial history of dyslexia and reading impairment. Typical readers without risk for dyslexia activate structures responsible for phonological processing already at the beginning of literacy. This group shows reduced brain activation over time during phonological processing, perhaps due to automatization of phonological skills. Children who develop reading impairment present a delay in the development of phonological structures such as the bilateral superior temporal gyri, left middle temporal gyrus, right insula and right frontal cortex, where we observed time and group interaction. Finally, typical readers with familial risk of dyslexia also present an atypical development of the neural phonological structures, visible both at the beginning of reading instruction and 2 years later. These children used a presumably efficient neural mechanism of phonological processing, based on the activation of the precentral and postcentral gyri, and achieved a typical level of phonological awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0–6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Being a late talker constitutes a risk factor for later neurodevelopmental disorders; however, its neurobiological basis remains unexplored. We aimed to determine the unique and mutual correlates of late talking and developmental dyslexia on brain structure and behavioral outcomes in a large sample of 8- to 10-year-old children in a between-groups design (N = 120). Brain structure was examined using voxel-based morphometry (to measure gray matter volume) and surface-based morphometry (to measure gray matter volume, cortical thickness, surface area, and curvature of the cortex). Behaviorally, late talking and dyslexia are independently connected to language and literacy skills, and late talkers have difficulties in grammar, phonological awareness, and reading accuracy. Children with dyslexia show impairments in all of the above, as well as in vocabulary, spelling, reading speed, and rapid automatized naming. Neuroanatomically, dyslexia is related to lower total intracranial volume and total surface area. Late talking is related to reduced cortical thickness in the left posterior cingulate gyrus and the right superior temporal gyrus, which are structures belonging to the dorsal speech articulatory-phonetic perception system. Finally, a cumulative effect of late talking and dyslexia was found on the left fusiform gray matter volume. This might explain inconsistencies in previous neuroanatomical studies of dyslexia. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The left ventral occipito-temporal (lvOT) cortex is considered to house the brain's representation of orthography (i.e., the spelling patterns of words). Because letter-sound coupling is crucial in reading, we investigated the engagement of the lvOT cortex in processing phonology (i.e., the sound patterns of words) as a function of reading acquisition. We tested 47 Polish children both at the beginning of formal literacy instruction and 2 years later. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, children performed auditory phonological tasks from small to large grain size levels (i.e., single phoneme, rhyme). We showed that orthographically relevant lvOT areas activated during small-grain size phonological tasks were skill-dependent, perhaps due to the relatively transparent mappings between orthography and phonology in Polish. We also studied activation pattern similarity between processing visual and auditory word stimuli in the lvOT. We found that a higher similarity level was observed in the anterior lvOT compared to the posterior lvOT after 2 years of schooling. This is consistent with models proposing a posterior-to-anterior shift in word processing during reading acquisition. We argue that the development of orthography-phonology coupling at the brain level reflects writing system-specific effects and a more universal pathway of the left vOT development in reading acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]