Orthographic Tasks Research Articles

ERPs Reveal Relationships Between Neural Orthographic Priming Effects and Reading Skill

Abstract. Masked priming has long been used to demonstrate the impact of brief presentations of orthographically related stimuli on visual word recognition. The aim of the present study was to examine neural correlates of orthographic priming produced by pronounceable and unpronounceable anagram primes. Crucially, we examined relationships between these priming effects and individual differences on a battery of measures assessing orthographic processing ability, current reading ability, and verbal intelligence in university students. Our study demonstrated group-level priming effects on the N200 and N400, with both components being primarily modulated by unpronounceable, orthographically illegal primes. Relationships between the extent of priming as indexed by N200 amplitude and speed of orthographic processing emerged, as reaction time (RT) on an orthographic choice task was associated with priming effects. Priming effects on N400 amplitude were related to phonological decoding efficiency. Those individuals with less efficient orthographic or phonological processing were more sensitive to the orthographic relationship between primes and targets. These findings demonstrate that university students vary in their sensitivity to orthographic priming and the degree to which orthographic information is used during word recognition.

More expertise for a better perspective: Task and strategy-driven adaptive neurofunctional reorganization for word production in high-performing older adults

ABSTRACTThe suggestion that neurofunctional reorganization may contribute to preserved language abilities is still emerging in aging studies. Some of these abilities, such as verbal fluency (VF), are not unitary but instead rely on different strategic processes that are differentially changed with age. Younger (n = 13) and older adults (n = 13) carried out an overt self-paced semantic and orthographic VF tasks within mixed fMRI design. Our results suggest that patterns of brain activation sustaining equivalent performances could be underpinned by different strategies facing brain changes during healthy aging. These main findings suggest that temporally mediated semantic clustering and frontally mediated orthographic switching were driven by evolutive neurofunctional resources in high-performing older adults. These age-related activation changes can appear to be compatible with the idea that unique neural patterns expressing distinctive cognitive strategies are necessary to support older adults’ performance on VF tasks.

White matter tract of orthographic recognition and its functional plasticity: Evidence from patients and congenital blinds

Event Abstract Back to Event White matter tract of orthographic recognition and its functional plasticity: Evidence from patients and congenital blinds Ke Wang1, Xiaonan Li1, Ruiwang Huang2, Junhua Ding1, Luping Song3 and Zaizhu Han1* 1 Beijing Normal University, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, China 2 South China Normal University, School of Psychology, China 3 Beijing Rehabilitation Hospital, Capital Medical University, College and China Rehabilitation Research Center, China Orthographic recognition, a pivotal stage during word reading, has been found to be supported by a neuroanatomical network. However, the white-matter connectivity in this network remains unclear because prior findings might be confounded by impure behavioral measures, potential brain structural reorganization, or limited samples of subjects and white-matter tracts. It is also unclear which part of the connectivity is inherent and which part is determined by postnatal visual experience. To address these issues, we separately investigated the relationship between the integrity of 20 major tracts in the whole brain and the pure orthographic index across 70 patients with short-term brain damage and across 31 congenitally blind readers. The integrity of the tracts was evaluated using the mean fractional anisotropy value (for patients and blind readers) and the lesion volume percentage (for patients). The orthographic index was measured by the residual of accuracies in the orthographic tasks, regressing out accuracies in the corresponding non-orthographic tasks. The observed effects of orthographic tracts were further validated by ruling out the influence of numerous potential confounding variables. We found that the left inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) was the only orthographic tract whose integrity values were significantly correlated with orthographic scores in the patients. Moreover, when the tract was split into the anterior and posterior branches along the visual word fusiform area (VWFA), both branches contributed to orthographic recognition in the patients. More importantly, the visual deprivation forced only the posterior but not the anterior branch of the tract to engage in orthographic processing, since the integrity values of the posterior rather than the anterior branch were significantly correlated with the performance of orthographic recognition in the congenitally blind subjects. Furthermore, the observed effects could not be accounted for by the potential confounding factors. These findings strengthen the vital role of the left ILF in orthographic processing and reveal the functional neuroplasticity of this tract in response to visual experience deprivation. Figure 1 Keywords: Orthographic recognition, white-matter tract, lesion-behavior mapping, Brain-damage patients, Congenital blindness Conference: Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada, 21 Oct - 23 Oct, 2018. Presentation Type: poster presentation Topic: Eligible for a student award Citation: Wang K, Li X, Huang R, Ding J, Song L and Han Z (2019). White matter tract of orthographic recognition and its functional plasticity: Evidence from patients and congenital blinds. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.228.00055 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 23 Apr 2018; Published Online: 22 Jan 2019. * Correspondence: Prof. Zaizhu Han, Beijing Normal University, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing, China, zzhhan@bnu.edu.cn Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Ke Wang Xiaonan Li Ruiwang Huang Junhua Ding Luping Song Zaizhu Han Google Ke Wang Xiaonan Li Ruiwang Huang Junhua Ding Luping Song Zaizhu Han Google Scholar Ke Wang Xiaonan Li Ruiwang Huang Junhua Ding Luping Song Zaizhu Han PubMed Ke Wang Xiaonan Li Ruiwang Huang Junhua Ding Luping Song Zaizhu Han Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Audio–visual synchronization in reading while listening to texts: Effects on visual behavior and verbal learning

Reading while listening to texts (RWL) is a promising way to improve the learning benefits provided by a reading experience. In an exploratory study, we investigated the effect of synchronizing the highlighting of words (visual) with their auditory (speech) counterpart during a RWL task. Forty French children from 3rd to 5th grade read short stories in their native language while hearing the story spoken by a narrator. In the non-synchronized (S−) condition the text was written in black on a white background, whereas in the synchronized (S+) RWL, the text was written in grey and the words were dynamically written in black when they were aurally displayed, in a karaoke-like fashion. The children were then unexpectedly tested on their memory for the orthographic form and semantic category of pseudowords that were included in the stories. The effect of synchronizing was null in the orthographic task and negative in the semantic task. Children's preference was mainly for the S− condition, except for the poorest readers who tended to prefer the S+ condition. In addition, the children's eye movements were recorded during reading. Gaze was affected by synchronization, with fewer but longer fixations on words, and fewer regressive saccades in the S+ condition compared to the S− condition. Thus, the S+ condition presumably captured the children's attention toward the currently heard word, which forced the children to be strictly aligned with the oral modality.

The oral and written side of word production in young and older adults: generation of lexical neighbors

ABSTRACTThe aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of aging on both spoken and written word production by using analogous tasks. To do so, a phonological neighbor generation task (Experiment 1) and an orthographic neighbor generation task (Experiment 2) were designed. In both tasks, young and older participants were given a word and had to generate as many words as they could think of by changing one phoneme in the target word (Experiment 1) or one letter in the target word (Experiment 2). The data of the two experiments were consistent, showing that the older adults generated fewer lexical neighbors and made more errors than the young adults. For both groups, the number of words produced, as well as their lexical frequency, decreased as a function of time. These data strongly support the assumption of a symmetrical age-related decline in the transmission of activation within the phonological and orthographic systems.

Elaboration of the method of using etymological analysis at the lessons of ukrainian language in primary school

The effectiveness of experimental methodology of using etymological analysis at the lessons of Ukrainian language in primary school is proved in the article. The problem of the study is urgent and is in pedagogical and methodological grounding of etymological work with a word, the study of origin and development of the words; explanation of origin of the word by its comparison with related words of the same or other languages, consideration of initial form and meaning of the word.The methodical recommendations as to the mastering of stable skills of etymological explanation of the words by the pupils are grounded in experimental study; the criteria of primary school pupils’ erudition in etymology were elaborated. In the study are considered the problems of etymological analysis at the lessons of Ukrainian language in primary school with combination of grammar and orthographic tasks, using of etymology elements as a mean of activation of schoolchildren’s lexicon with the help of lexical-grammar, stylistic and logical exercises and different techniques of explanation of the meanings of new words

Dyslexic Children Show Atypical Cerebellar Activation and Cerebro-Cerebellar Functional Connectivity in Orthographic and Phonological Processing.

Previous neuroimaging studies have found atypical cerebellar activation in individuals with dyslexia in either motor-related tasks or language tasks. However, studies investigating atypical cerebellar activation in individuals with dyslexia have mostly used tasks tapping phonological processing. A question that is yet unanswered is whether the cerebellum in individuals with dyslexia functions properly during orthographic processing of words, as growing evidence shows that the cerebellum is also involved in visual and spatial processing. Here, we investigated cerebellar activation and cerebro-cerebellar functional connectivity during word processing in dyslexic readers and typically developing readers using tasks that tap orthographic and phonological codes. In children with dyslexia, we observed an abnormally higher engagement of the bilateral cerebellum for the orthographic task, which was negatively correlated with literacy measures. The greater the reading impairment was for young dyslexic readers, the stronger the cerebellar activation was. This suggests a compensatory role of the cerebellum in reading for children with dyslexia. In addition, a tendency for higher cerebellar activation in dyslexic readers was found in the phonological task. Moreover, the functional connectivity was stronger for dyslexic readers relative to typically developing readers between the lobule VI of the right cerebellum and the left fusiform gyrus during the orthographic task and between the lobule VI of the left cerebellum and the left supramarginal gyrus during the phonological task. This pattern of results suggests that the cerebellum compensates for reading impairment through the connections with specific brain regions responsible for the ongoing reading task. These findings enhance our understanding of the cerebellum's involvement in reading and reading impairment.

Visual tracking during implicit and explicit orthographic recognition tasks in Spanish-speaking teenagers

Visual tracking during implicit and explicit orthographic recognition tasks in Spanish-speaking teenagers

The Development of Reading and Spelling in Arabic Orthography: Two Parallel Processes?

The parallels between reading and spelling skills in Arabic were tested. One-hundred forty-three native Arab students, with typical reading development, from second, fourth, and sixth grades were tested with reading, spelling and orthographic decision tasks. The results indicated a full parallel between the reading and spelling performances within the second and fourth graders where the performance in the orthographic decision task was significantly lag behind. For the sixth graders, full parallel was found between the spelling and the orthographic decision performances with significant superiority of both performances on the reading performance. The results were discussed in light of developmental course of the orthographic representations and the impact of the specific orthographic features of the Arabic orthography on reading and spelling.

Impact of early home language exposure on phonological and orthographic skills and their contributions to English literacy abilities in English monolingual and Chinese–English bilingual adults

ABSTRACTRelatively little is known about the importance of phonological and orthographic processing skills for reading and spelling in monolingual and bilingual adults. We compared these underlying skills, using a series of phonological and orthographic tasks, in English monolingual (n = 28), English first language and Chinese second language bilingual (n = 21), and Chinese first language and English second language bilingual adults (n = 22) who were equally proficient in reading and spelling English, and examined the contributions of these skills to English word reading and spelling for each group. The results showed group differences in phonological processing, with English monolingual adults having better phonological skills than both groups of bilingual adults. No significant group differences were found for orthographic processing. Regression analyses showed phonological skills were a unique predictor of English word reading for both bilingual groups, but not for the English monolingual group. Orthographic skills were a significant predictor of English word spelling, but only for the English monolingual adults. This suggests there may be a long-lasting influence of being exposed to two contrasting languages on skills underlying literacy in bilingual individuals.

Reading Skills in Down Syndrome: An Examination of Orthographic Knowledge.

The primary goal of this study was to examine the word identification domain of the Simple View of Reading in participants with Down syndrome (DS) by comparing them to participants with typical development (TD) matched on word identification ability. Two subskills, phonological recoding and orthographic knowledge, were measured. Results revealed that individuals with DS performed similarly to controls on 2 measures of orthographic knowledge, but more poorly on phonological recoding and a third measure of orthographic knowledge. The first two orthographic tasks included real words as stimuli; the third task used letter patterns, not real words. These results suggest that individuals with DS may have a relative strength in word-specific orthographic knowledge but not in general orthographic knowledge.

Effect of radical-position regularity for Chinese orthographic skills of Chinese-as-a-second-language learners

The present study investigated the influence of radical position regularity in Chinese character orthographic tasks among Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) learners. The role that radical position regularity plays in the learning of Chinese characters was also verified by showing the aforementioned regularity. To address this issue, two experiments were conducted using the Chinese Radical Assembly Game (CRAG). The first experiment involved 88 CSL. The participants were grouped into high and low grades according to the results of a character recognition assessment. The participants were then randomly assigned to an REG group (radical regular arrangement matrix) and an RAN group (radical random arrangement matrix). The results showed there was no difference in the orthography performance between the REG and RAN groups. However, the orthography performances of the high-grade individuals were better than those of the low-grade individuals in the REG group. The second experiment involved another 84 CSL learners. The results showed that the orthography performances of the low-grade individuals were not different than those of the high-grade individuals after giving radical position regularity to the REG. It support the effect of radical position regularity and suggest that the aforementioned regularity was helpful to CSL learners in the process of learning Chinese characters.

Stroop interference associated with efficient reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing

ABSTRACTThe Stroop Color–Word Test involves a dynamic interplay between reading and executive functioning that elicits intuitions of word reading automaticity. One such intuition is that strong reading skills (i.e., more automatized word reading) play a disruptive role within the test, contributing to Stroop interference. However, evidence has accumulated that challenges this intuition. The present study examined associations among Stroop interference, reading skills (i.e., isolated word identification, grapheme-to-phoneme mapping, phonemic awareness, reading fluency) measured on standardized tests, and orthographic skills measured on experimental computerized tasks. Among university students (N = 152), correlational analyses showed greater Stroop interference to be associated with (a) relatively low scores on all standardized reading tests, and (b) longer response latencies on orthographic tasks. Hierarchical regression demonstrated that reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing predicted unique and significant variance in Stroop interference beyond baseline rapid naming. Results suggest that strong reading skills, including orthographic processing, play a supportive role in resolving Stroop interference.

Reading in the dark: neural correlates and cross-modal plasticity for learning to read entire words without visual experience

Cognitive neuroscience has long attempted to determine the ways in which cortical selectivity develops, and the impact of nature vs. nurture on it. Congenital blindness (CB) offers a unique opportunity to test this question as the brains of blind individuals develop without visual experience. Here we approach this question through the reading network. Several areas in the visual cortex have been implicated as part of the reading network, and one of the main ones among them is the VWFA, which is selective to the form of letters and words. But what happens in the CB brain? On the one hand, it has been shown that cross-modal plasticity leads to the recruitment of occipital areas, including the VWFA, for linguistic tasks. On the other hand, we have recently demonstrated VWFA activity for letters in contrast to other visual categories when the information is provided via other senses such as touch or audition. Which of these tasks is more dominant? By which mechanism does the CB brain process reading?Using fMRI and visual-to-auditory sensory substitution which transfers the topographical features of the letters we compare reading with semantic and scrambled conditions in a group of CB.We found activation in early auditory and visual cortices during the early processing phase (letter), while the later phase (word) showed VWFA and bilateral dorsal-intraparietal activations for words. This further supports the notion that many visual regions in general, even early visual areas, also maintain a predilection for task processing even when the modality is variable and in spite of putative lifelong linguistic cross-modal plasticity.Furthermore, we find that the VWFA is recruited preferentially for letter and word form, while it was not recruited, and even exhibited deactivation, for an immediately subsequent semantic task suggesting that despite only short sensory substitution experience orthographic task processing can dominate semantic processing in the VWFA. On a wider scope, this implies that at least in some cases cross-modal plasticity which enables the recruitment of areas for new tasks may be dominated by sensory independent task specific activation.

Left ventral occipitotemporal activation during orthographic and semantic processing of auditory words

The present fMRI study investigated the hypothesis that activation of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) in response to auditory words can be attributed to lexical orthographic rather than lexico-semantic processing. To this end, we presented auditory words in both an orthographic (“three or four letter word?”) and a semantic (“living or nonliving?”) task. In addition, a auditory control condition presented tones in a pitch evaluation task. The results showed that the left vOT exhibited higher activation for orthographic relative to semantic processing of auditory words with a peak in the posterior part of vOT. Comparisons to the auditory control condition revealed that orthographic processing of auditory words elicited activation in a large vOT cluster. In contrast, activation for semantic processing was only weak and restricted to the middle part vOT. We interpret our findings as speaking for orthographic processing in left vOT. In particular, we suggest that activation in left middle vOT can be attributed to accessing orthographic whole-word representations. While activation of such representations was experimentally ascertained in the orthographic task, it might have also occurred automatically in the semantic task. Activation in the more posterior vOT region, on the other hand, may reflect the generation of explicit images of word-specific letter sequences required by the orthographic but not the semantic task. In addition, based on cross-modal suppression, the finding of marked deactivations in response to the auditory tones is taken to reflect the visual nature of representations and processes in left vOT.

Aer yuo looking cloesly? Even good spellers are impacted by partial cue reading

Differences in letter string processing between better and relatively poorer (average) spellers were examined. Forty undergraduate students completed a simultaneous orthographic matching task judging pairs of letter strings as same or different. Reading exposure, spelling, and reading habits were measured. Significant differences in reaction times, but not accuracy, were found between the two groups. When the groups were combined, a negative correlation was found between reaction time in the matching task and spelling ability. Taken together, these results suggest that unexpectedly poorer spellers tend to read words based on partial cues, while excellent spellers attend to entire words. Further, results indicate that processing partial vs. full cues may be a continuum, rather than a dichotomy, with even average spellers processing less than do excellent spellers. These results have implications for how unexpectedly poor spellers are defined in research and for the range of individuals who could improve their spelling by processing fuller cues.

Disruption of relational processing underlies poor memory for order.

McDaniel and Bugg (2008) proposed that relatively uncommon stimuli and encoding tasks encourage elaborative encoding of individual items (item-specific processing), whereas relatively typical or common encoding tasks encourage encoding of associations among list items (relational processing). It is this relational processing that is thought to result in better memory for the serial order of a study list. We report 4 experiments examining memory for order demonstrating that (a) both semantic and orthographic tasks can impair memory for order when performed on individual items, (b) item-specific processing is not necessary for impairment because even an item-generic key press task harms memory for order, (c) impaired memory for order is due primarily to distraction during the processing of an item rather than between list items, and (d) even an unusual processing task will preserve memory for order as long as that task encourages the encoding of item-to-item relations. These findings suggest that an encoding task will disrupt order memory only when it is both attention grabbing (either through its atypicality or by requiring an overt response) and nonrelational.

Encoding order and developmental dyslexia: a family of skills predicting different orthographic components.

We investigated order encoding in developmental dyslexia using a task that presented nonalphanumeric visual characters either simultaneously or sequentially—to tap spatial and temporal order encoding, respectively—and asked participants to reproduce their order. Dyslexic participants performed poorly in the sequential condition, but normally in the simultaneous condition, except for positions most susceptible to interference. These results are novel in demonstrating a selective difficulty with temporal order encoding in a dyslexic group. We also tested the associations between our order reconstruction tasks and: (a) lexical learning and phonological tasks; and (b) different reading and spelling tasks. Correlations were extensive when the whole group of participants was considered together. When dyslexics and controls were considered separately, different patterns of association emerged between orthographic tasks on the one side and tasks tapping order encoding, phonological processing, and written learning on the other. These results indicate that different skills support different aspects of orthographic processing and are impaired to different degrees in individuals with dyslexia. Therefore, developmental dyslexia is not caused by a single impairment, but by a family of deficits loosely related to difficulties with order. Understanding the contribution of these different deficits will be crucial to deepen our understanding of this disorder.

Preliteracy signatures of poor-reading abilities in resting-state EEG

The hereditary character of dyslexia suggests the presence of putative underlying neural anomalies already in preliterate age. Here, we investigated whether early neurophysiological correlates of future reading difficulties—a hallmark of dyslexia—could be identified in the resting-state EEG of preliterate children. The children in this study were recruited at birth and classified on the basis of parents' performance on reading tests to be at-risk of becoming poor readers (n = 48) or not (n = 14). Eyes-open rest EEG was measured at the age of 3 years, and the at-risk children were divided into fluent readers (n = 24) and non-fluent readers (n = 24) after reading assessment at their third grade of school. We found that fluent readers and non-fluent readers differed in normalized spectral amplitude. Non-fluent readers were characterized by lower amplitude in the delta-1 frequency band (0.5–2 Hz) and higher amplitude in the alpha-1 band (6–8 Hz) in multiple scalp regions compared to control and at-risk fluent readers. Interestingly, across groups these EEG biomarkers correlated with several behavioral test scores measured in the third grade. Specifically, the performance on reading fluency, phonological and orthographic tasks and rapid automatized naming task correlated positively with delta-1 and negatively with alpha-1. Together, our results suggest that combining family-risk status, neurophysiological testing and behavioral test scores in a longitudinal setting may help uncover physiological mechanisms implicated with neurodevelopmental disorders such as the predisposition to reading disabilities.

Evidence for the automatic processing of prelexical codes in an orthographic but not a phonological task.

The automatic activation of phonological and orthographic information in auditory and visual word processing was examined using a task-set procedure. Participants engaged in a phonological task (i.e., determining whether the letter "a" in a word sounded like /e/ or /æ/) or an orthographic task (i.e., determining whether the sound /s/ in a word was spelled with an "s" or a "c"). Participants were cued regarding which task to perform simultaneously with, or 750 ms before, a clear or degraded target. The stimulus clarity effect (i.e., clear words responded to faster than degraded words) was absorbed into the time that it took participants to identify the task on the basis of the cue in a simultaneous cue-target as compared to a delayed cue-target condition, but only for the orthographic task. These data are consistent with the claim that prelexical processing occurs in a capacity-free manner upon stimulus presentation when participants are trying to extract orthographic codes from words presented in the visual and auditory modalities. Such affirmative data were not obtained when participants attempted to extract phonological codes from words, since here the effects of stimulus clarity and cue delay were additive.