Children With Reading Difficulty Rely on Unimodal Neural Processing for Phonemic Awareness.

Melissa Randazzo,Emma B Greenspon,James R Booth,Chris Mcnorgan

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2019.00390

Abstract

Phonological awareness skills in children with reading difficulty (RD) may reflect impaired automatic integration of orthographic and phonological representations. However, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms involved in phonological awareness for children with RD. Eighteen children with RD, ages 9–13, participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study designed to assess the relationship of two constructs of phonological awareness, phoneme synthesis, and phoneme analysis, with crossmodal rhyme judgment. Participants completed a rhyme judgment task presented in two modality conditions; unimodal auditory only and crossmodal audiovisual. Measures of phonological awareness were correlated with unimodal, but not crossmodal, lexical processing. Moreover, these relationships were found only in unisensory brain regions, and not in multisensory brain areas. The results of this study suggest that children with RD rely on unimodal representations and unisensory brain areas, and provide insight into the role of phonemic awareness in mapping between auditory and visual modalities during literacy acquisition.

Highlights

Phonological awareness skills are important in learning to read in alphabetic languages (Bus and van IJzendoorn, 1999; Ehri et al, 2001; Lonigan et al, 2009)
We explored the relationship between phonemic awareness and modality presentation in children with reading difficulty (RD) along a continuum of reading ability
Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have found that in typically developing (TD) readers, phonemic awareness skill is associated with crossmodal integration of phonology and orthography (Frost et al, 2009; McNorgan et al, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

Phonological awareness skills are important in learning to read in alphabetic languages (Bus and van IJzendoorn, 1999; Ehri et al, 2001; Lonigan et al, 2009). Phonemic awareness skills are metalinguistic skills that include the ability to manipulate the sound structure of oral language (Wagner and Torgesen, 1987; Share, 1995; Ehri et al, 2001; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). These skills are a subset of phonological awareness skills that operate on smaller phonological segments at the level of the individual speech sound, or phoneme (Anthony et al, 2003; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). In elision tasks, given the instruction to produce ‘‘cat’’ without the ‘‘/k/,’’ the verbal response ‘‘/æt/,’’ demonstrates the analysis principle

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Discussion

Conclusion