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The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently discriminate letters and words. Therefore, it is supposed that this unlearning process takes place in a gradual way and that reading expertise modulates mirror-letter discrimination. However, to date no supporting evidence for this has been obtained. We present data from an eye-movement study that investigated the degree of sensitivity to mirror-letters in a group of beginning readers and a group of expert readers. Participants had to decide which of the two strings presented on a screen corresponded to an auditorily presented word. Visual displays always included the correct target word and one distractor word. Results showed that those distractors that were the same as the target word except for the mirror lateralization of two internal letters attracted participants' attention more than distractors created by replacement of 2 internal letters. Interestingly, the time course of the effects was found to be different for the 2 groups, with beginning readers showing a greater tolerance (decreased sensitivity) to mirror-letters than expert readers. Implications of these findings are discussed within the framework of preceding evidence showing how reading expertise modulates letter identification. (Contains 1 table, 4 figures, and 4 notes.)

The aims of this study were (a) to determine whether Spanish children with reading disabilities (RD) show a speech perception deficit and (b) to explore the locus and nature of this perceptive deficit. A group of 29 children with RD, 41 chronological age-matched controls, and 27 reading ability-matched younger controls were tested on tasks of speech perception. The effect of linguistic unit (word vs. syllable) and type of phonetic contrast (voicing, place and manner of articulation) were analyzed in terms of the number of errors and the response time. The results revealed a speech perception deficit in Spanish children with RD that was independent of the type of phonetic contrast and of linguistic unit.

Introduction: The aim of this study was to examine the role of multiletter units, such as the morpheme and whole word, in accessing the lexicon, in Spanish children with dyslexia. Method: A sample of 60 participants were selected and organised i n three different groups: 1) an experimental group of 18 reading-disabled children, (2) a control group of 27 normal readers matched in age with the reading disabled group, and (3) a control group of 15 younger children at the same reading level as the reading disabled group. Homophones and morphological root comprehension tasks were used. Results: The results were analysed using measures of accuracy and latency for the morphological comprehension task and accuracy for the homophone task. These showed that there was a lexical processing deficit in children with reading disabilities compared to younger children with the same reading level. Nevertheless, when we analysed the latency of the morphological comprehension task, results showed that this latency decreased during presentation, independently of the groups, although the performance of normal readers matched in age with the reading disabled children was significantly better than the two other groups. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Introduction: The main purpose of this study is to investigate whether children who have reading disabilities in an alphabetically transparent orthography show a syntactic processing deficit. This research focuses on exploring syntactic processing and the use of morphological markers by subjects with reading disabilities. We analyze these groups' execution of various tasks from the syntactic module of the SICOLE multimedia battery (Jimenez, et al., 2002), grouping them into three sets: gender and number agreement, grammatical structure and function words. Method: A sample of 97 subjects was selected (52 boys and 45 girls). The design involves three groups according to reading level: one experimental group formed by 29 reading-disabled (RD) subjects in fourth grade; one control group of 41 good readers of equivalent age; and one control group of 27 subjects from second grade with equivalent reading level to the RD group. Results: The RD children obtain lower scores in the global syntactic processing scale than normal readers of a younger age. When controlling for the effect of working memory, the deficit in syntactic processing is shown in gender and number agreement tasks, and not in grammatical structure or function word tasks. Discussion: Findings suggest that the deficit in syntactic processing is determined by difficulties in phonological processing which characterize children with RD. Children with RD have more difficulty in processing gender and number agreement tasks since they are more phonologically demanding. On the other hand, these difficulties are not manifest as a deficit when the tasks provide contextual information, such as in the case of grammatical structure and function word tasks. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

A study assessed whether the effects of computer-assisted practice on visual word recognition differed for 73 Spanish children with reading disabilities with or without aptitude-achievement discrepancy. Computer-assisted intervention improved word recognition. However, children with dyslexia had more difficulties than poor readers during computer-based word reading that required extensive phonological computation. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Language is a uniquely human ability that evolved at some point in the roughly 6,000,000 years since human and chimpanzee lines diverged (1,2). Even in the most linguistically impoverished environments, children naturally develop sophisticated language systems (3). In contrast, reading is a learnt skill that does not develop without intensive tuition and practice. Learning to read is likely to involve ontogenic structural brain changes (4-6), but these are nearly impossible to isolate in children owing to concurrent biological, environmental and social maturational changes. In Colombia, guerrillas are re-integrating into mainstream society and learning to read for the first time as adults. This presents a unique opportunity to investigate how literacy changes the brain, without the maturational complications present in children. Here we compare structural brain scans from those who learnt to read as adults (late-literates) with those from a carefully matched set of illiterates. Late-literates had more white matter in the splenium of the corpus callosum and more grey matter in bilateral angular, dorsal occipital, middle temporal, left supramarginal and superior temporal gyri. The importance of these brain regions for skilled reading was investigated in early literates, who learnt to read as children. We found anatomical connections linking the left and right angular and dorsal occipital gyri through the area of the corpus callosum where white matter was higher in late-literates than in illiterates; that reading, relative to object naming, increased the interhemispheric functional connectivity between the left and right angular gyri; and that activation in the left angular gyrus exerts top-down modulation on information flow from the left dorsal occipital gyrus to the left supramarginal gyrus. These findings demonstrate how the regions identified in late-literates interact during reading, relative to object naming, in early literates., After decades spent fighting, members of the guerrilla forces have begun re-integrating into mainstream Colombian society, introducing a sizeable population of illiterate adults who have no formal education. Upon putting [...]

Prior research suggests that predictive inferences take time to construct on-line. The present study examines the relative contribution of time available during and after reading an inducing context. In six experiments, we manipulated the presentation rate of the context and the delay between the onset of the last word in the context and a target word. A predicting, or a control, sentence context was followed by a target word, which represented the predicted event or an unlikely event. The results indicated that increasing the time available during reading of the context improved comprehension of explicit information, but it did not affect construction of inferences. In contrast, increasing the delay at the end of the context did not affect explicit comprehension, but it enhanced the probability of inferences, as revealed by shorter latencies in naming the predictable target word after the inducing context, relative to the control context. These findings show that readers defer making predictive inferences until 1 sec after the sentence context has been read, regardless of the time available when they are processing the context.