Abstract
Letter-speech sound (LSS) integration is crucial for initial stages of reading acquisition. However, the relationship between cortical organization for supporting LSS integration, including unimodal and multimodal processes, and reading skills in early readers remains unclear. In the present study, we measured brain responses to Finnish letters and speech sounds from 29 typically developing Finnish children in a child-friendly audiovisual integration experiment using magnetoencephalography. Brain source activations in response to auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli as well as audiovisual integration response were correlated with reading skills and cognitive skills predictive of reading development after controlling for the effect of age. Regression analysis showed that from the brain measures, the auditory late response around 400 ms showed the largest association with phonological processing and rapid automatized naming abilities. In addition, audiovisual integration effect was most pronounced in the left and right temporoparietal regions and the activities in several of these temporoparietal regions correlated with reading and writing skills. Our findings indicated the important role of temporoparietal regions in the early phase of learning to read and their unique contribution to reading skills.
Highlights
Letter-speech sound (LSS) integration is a key step in learning to read for alphabetic languages
The results showed that the strength of audiovisual speech integration significantly correlated with age, whereas the performance on non-speech tasks seemed to be similar across all ages
The waveforms were averaged over left and right temporal and occipital gradiometer channels
Summary
Letter-speech sound (LSS) integration is a key step in learning to read for alphabetic languages. The development and reorganization of early readers’ language circuits for supporting automatized LSS integration and how such integration is related to the development of fluent reading are crucial questions from both theoretical and practical point of view (Shankweiler et al, 2008; Dehaene et al, 2015). In another study using four contrasting languages to find common indices of successful literacy acquisition, highly similar neural organization for print-speech convergence was observed between the languages. Such print-speech convergence was suggested as a common brain signature of reading proficiency (Rueckl et al, 2015).
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