Cortical Sequence of Word Perception in Beginning Readers

Tiina M. Parviainen · Päivi Helenius · Elisa Poskiparta · Pekka Niemi · Riitta H. Salmelin

74 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Neuroscience

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Reading and Literacy Development Visual perception and processing mechanisms Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Abstract

Efficient analysis of written words in normal reading is likely to reflect use of neural circuits formed by experience during childhood rather than an innate process. We investigated the cortical sequence of word perception in first-graders (7-8 years old), with special emphasis on occipitotemporal cortex in which, in adults, letter-string-sensitive responses are detected at 150 ms after stimulus. To identify neural activation that is sensitive to either the amount of basic visual features or specifically to letter strings, we recorded whole-head magnetoencephalography responses to words embedded in three different levels of noise and to symbol strings. As was shown previously in adults, activation reflecting stimulus nonspecific visual feature analysis was localized to occipital cortex in children. It was followed by letter-string-sensitive activation in the left occipitotemporal cortex and, subsequently, in the temporal cortex. These processing stages were correlated in timing and activation strength. Compared with adults, however, the timing of activation was clearly delayed in children, and the delay was progressively increased from occipital to occipitotemporal and further to temporal areas. This finding is likely to reflect increasing immaturity of the underlying neural generators when advancing from low-level visual analysis to higher-order areas involved in written word perception. When a salient occipitotemporal letter-string-sensitive activation was detected (10 of 18 children), its strength was correlated with phonological skills, in line with the known relevance of phonological awareness in reading acquisition.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 74 citations exist upstream.

References

1991Beginning to read : Thinking and learning about print. By Marilyn Jager Adams. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990. Pp. x, 494. Cloth $29.95.1989A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming.1987The nature of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills.1995Phonological recoding and self-teaching: sine qua non of reading acquisition 1993Models of reading aloud: Dual-route and parallel-distributed-processing approaches.2003The visual word form area: expertise for reading in the fusiform gyrus 1976Rapid ‘automatized’ naming (R.A.N.): Dyslexia differentiated from other learning disabilities 2002Disruption of posterior brain systems for reading in children with developmental dyslexia

Cited by

2012Reading acquisition reorganizes the phonological awareness network only in alphabetic writing systems 2014Fine Neural Tuning for Orthographic Properties of Words Emerges Early in Children Reading Alphabetic Script 2019Emerging neural specialization of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex to characters through phonological association learning in preschool children 2013Children’s and Adults’ On-Line Processing of Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences during Reading

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.