Abstract
Typical oral and written language learners (controls) (5 girls, 4 boys) completed fMRI reading judgment tasks (sub-word grapheme-phoneme, word spelling, sentences with and without spelling foils, affixed words, sentences with and without affix foils, and multi-sentence). Analyses identified connectivity within and across adjacent levels (units) of language in reading: from subword to word to syntax in Set I and from word to syntax to multi-sentence in Set II). Typicals were compared to (a) students with dyslexia (6 girls, 10 boys) on the subword and word tasks in Set I related to levels of language impaired in dyslexia, and (b) students with oral and written language learning disability (OWL LD) (3 girls, 2 boys) on the morphology and syntax tasks in Set II, related to levels of language impaired in OWL LD. Results for typical language learners showed that adjacent levels of language in the reading brain share common and unique connectivity. The dyslexia group showed over-connectivity to a greater degree on the imaging tasks related to their levels of language impairments than the OWL LD group who showed under-connectivity to a greater degree than did the dyslexia group on the imaging tasks related to their levels of language impairment. Results for these students in grades 4 to 9 (ages 9 to 14) are discussed in reference to the contribution of patterns of connectivity across levels of language to understanding the nature of persisting dyslexia and dysgraphia despite early intervention.
Highlights
The current interdisciplinary study drew on contributions from developmental psycholinguistics and neuroimaging to study the multiple levels of language in the reading brain
Less research has focused on how the brain inter-relates the various levels-of-language involved in learning to read so that the sub-word level is coordinated with the word-level, the word-level is coordinated with the syntactic-level, and the syntactic-level is coordinated with the text-level in the reading brain
The goal of the current study was to investigate how the brain supports each of the increasingly larger units of language for orchestration of mind [2] in constructing a reading brain. Of interest was both those who learned to read without a struggle and those who experienced persisting struggles during middle childhood and early adolescence in acquiring language skill at specific levels-of –language such as word spelling in dyslexia [3] or syntactic/text levels for listening and reading comprehension and oral and written expression in specific language impairment (SLI) [4,5] referred to as Oral and Written Language Learning Disability (OWL LD) [6]
Summary
The current interdisciplinary study drew on contributions from developmental psycholinguistics and neuroimaging to study the multiple levels (units) of language in the reading brain. The goal of the current study was to investigate how the brain supports each of the increasingly larger units (levels) of language for orchestration of mind [2] in constructing a reading brain. Of interest was both those who learned to read without a struggle and those who experienced persisting struggles during middle childhood and early adolescence in acquiring language skill at specific levels-of –language such as word spelling in dyslexia [3] or syntactic/text levels for listening and reading comprehension and oral and written expression in specific language impairment (SLI) [4,5] referred to as Oral and Written Language Learning Disability (OWL LD) [6]
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