28 posts · 13,883 views
Summaries of recent research on reading and word recognition.
Livia
28 posts
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- June 22, 2011
- 05:24 AM
- 413 views
N1 Specialization in Children with Dyslexia
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Advanced
It's been a little while, but we've been talking about the N1 component and how it relates to reading. Just to recap, the N1 component is an ERP component occurring at around 170 ms. In normal reading adults, the component is stronger for words than for symbols. We will refer to the words minus symbols difference as “N1 specialization for words .” Pre-reading kindergartners do not have this N1 specialization, while second graders have a stronger N1 specializa........ Read more »
Maurer U, Brem S, Bucher K, Kranz F, Benz R, Steinhausen HC, & Brandeis D. (2007) Impaired tuning of a fast occipito-temporal response for print in dyslexic children learning to read. Brain : a journal of neurology, 130(Pt 12), 3200-10. PMID: 17728359
- June 22, 2011
- 05:24 AM
- 421 views
N1 Specialization in Children with Dyslexia
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Advanced
It's been a little while, but we've been talking about the N1 component and how it relates to reading. Just to recap, the N1 component is an ERP component occurring at around 170 ms. In normal reading adults, the component is stronger for words than for symbols. We will refer to the words minus symbols difference as “N1 specialization for words .” Pre-reading kindergartners do not have this N1 specialization, while second graders have a stronger N1 specializa........ Read more »
Maurer U, Brem S, Bucher K, Kranz F, Benz R, Steinhausen HC, & Brandeis D. (2007) Impaired tuning of a fast occipito-temporal response for print in dyslexic children learning to read. Brain : a journal of neurology, 130(Pt 12), 3200-10. PMID: 17728359
- April 12, 2011
- 03:31 PM
- 436 views
The N1 Component in Second Graders
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Advanced
Last week, we learned that the N1 component in normal reading adults differentiated between words and symbols, while the N1 component in pre-reading kindergartners did not. The question now is, at what point in development does N1 component start resembling that of adults? Maurer and colleagues tested the same kindergartners from their 2005 paper when the kids were in second grade to see how their brain activity changed after two years of reading instruction.
These w........ Read more »
Maurer U, Brem S, Kranz F, Bucher K, Benz R, Halder P, Steinhausen HC, & Brandeis D. (2006) Coarse neural tuning for print peaks when children learn to read. NeuroImage, 33(2), 749-58. PMID: 16920367
- April 8, 2011
- 11:10 AM
- 508 views
The N1 Component in Prereading Children
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
Just to recap from the last article, the N170 is an ERP component that differentiates between words and symbol strings in normal reading adults. This the specialization developed after learning to read, or does it have something to do with the visual properties of symbols?
Maurer and colleagues tested pre-reading kindergartners to see whether the specialization is there before they learn to read. They had kids perform the same task as adults (looking at........ Read more »
Maurer U, Brem S, Bucher K, & Brandeis D. (2005) Emerging neurophysiological specialization for letter strings. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 17(10), 1532-52. PMID: 16269095
- April 7, 2011
- 03:13 PM
- 475 views
Introduction to the N170 Response to Words
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
This month is N170 month. I'm going to be going through a bunch of papers by Urs Maurer on the N170 ERP component and how it relates to word processing. EEG is not my specialty, so hopefully I won't mess anything up.
For this post, we'll start with the basics. The N170 is an ERP component measured in EEG experiments. The N means that it is a negative potential, and the 170 means that it peaks roughly at around 170 ms, although the timing can vary. T........ Read more »
Maurer U, Brandeis D, & McCandliss BD. (2005) Fast, visual specialization for reading in English revealed by the topography of the N170 ERP response. Behavioral and brain functions : BBF, 13. PMID: 16091138
- February 27, 2011
- 11:13 PM
- 315 views
Brain Measures Predict Future Improvement in Children With Dyslexia
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate
Disclaimer: My PI is an author on this paper.
There is a lot of variability in outcomes for children diagnosed with dyslexia. Some children improve greatly over time, while others don't. Today, we're looking at a paper that asks whether it's possible to predict improvement in children with dyslexia.
Fumiko Hoeft and colleagues scanned children with and without dyslexia while performing a word rhyme task. They also tested the children on several reading measures......... Read more »
Hoeft F, McCandliss BD, Black JM, Gantman A, Zakerani N, Hulme C, Lyytinen H, Whitfield-Gabrieli S, Glover GH, Reiss AL.... (2011) Neural systems predicting long-term outcome in dyslexia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(1), 361-6. PMID: 21173250
- January 27, 2011
- 07:01 PM
- 320 views
Don't Assume that fMRI and MEG Will Give You Comparable Results
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate/Advanced
There are three common methods of studying brain function in normal human populations: fMRI, MEG, an EEG. There is surprisingly little crosstalk between the techniques, mostly due to practical issues.For better...
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Vartiainen J, Liljeström M, Koskinen M, Renvall H, & Salmelin R. (2011) Functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygenation level-dependent signal and magnetoencephalography evoked responses yield different neural functionality in reading. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 31(3), 1048-58. PMID: 21248130
- January 24, 2011
- 06:41 PM
- 345 views
Recycling Neurons for Reading
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accesibility: Intermediate-Advanced
Our brains have evolved to be good at certain things: seeing, hearing, learning language, and interacting with other similar brains, to name a few examples. But say you want it to do something new – look at symbols...
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Dehaene S, Pegado F, Braga LW, Ventura P, Nunes Filho G, Jobert A, Dehaene-Lambertz G, Kolinsky R, Morais J, & Cohen L. (2010) How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language. Science (New York, N.Y.), 330(6009), 1359-64. PMID: 21071632
- October 7, 2010
- 04:47 PM
- 447 views
White Matter and Reading Ability
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
Hello folks. Things are pretty busy over here and I might be having to review a lot of papers soon, so there's a possibility that entries here will get shorter and a bit more technical. But we'll...
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ANDREWS, J., BEN-SHACHAR, M., YEATMAN, J., FLOM, L., LUNA, B., & FELDMAN, H. (2009) Reading performance correlates with white-matter properties in preterm and term children. Developmental Medicine , 52(6). DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8749.2009.03456.x
Rimrodt, S., Peterson, D., Denckla, M., Kaufmann, W., & Cutting, L. (2010) White matter microstructural differences linked to left perisylvian language network in children with dyslexia. Cortex, 46(6), 739-749. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2009.07.008
- August 18, 2010
- 02:20 PM
- 505 views
Noise Exclusion Deficits in Dyslexia
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
The human visual system includes two pathways, magnocellular and parvocellular, deriving from two types of retinal ganglion cells that project to different layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus. ...
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Sperling, A., Lu, Z., Manis, F., & Seidenberg, M. (2005) Deficits in perceptual noise exclusion in developmental dyslexia. Nature Neuroscience. DOI: 10.1038/nn1474
- August 4, 2010
- 03:14 PM
- 415 views
Sensitivity and Specialization in the Occipitatemporal Region: Differences in Dyslexic Children
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Advanced/intermediate
Early research on the role of the occipitotemporal region in reading often focused on characterizing a single region in the mid fusiform, commonly called the visual word form area. Since then, focus has gradually...
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van der Mark S, Bucher K, Maurer U, Schulz E, Brem S, Buckelmüller J, Kronbichler M, Loenneker T, Klaver P, Martin E.... (2009) Children with dyslexia lack multiple specializations along the visual word-form (VWF) system. NeuroImage, 47(4), 1940-9. PMID: 19446640
- July 8, 2010
- 06:28 PM
- 533 views
fMRI of Letter Processing in Children and Adults
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
How is letter processing different from word processing? Since letters compose words, many reading models have letter processing earlier in the reading stream, but there is still room for more imaging...
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Turkeltaub PE, Flowers DL, Lyon LG, & Eden GF. (2008) Development of ventral stream representations for single letters. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 13-29. PMID: 19076386
- June 24, 2010
- 12:15 AM
- 520 views
A Meta-Analysis of Dyslexia Brain Imaging Studies
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Advanced
fMRI experiments, with their small sample sizes, can easily fall victim to variability within the subject pool. This is especially true for patient studies. So it’s nice to step back and look at the big picture once in a...
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Richlan, F., Kronbichler, M., & Wimmer, H. (2009) Functional abnormalities in the dyslexic brain: A quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. Human Brain Mapping, 30(10), 3299-3308. DOI: 10.1002/hbm.20752
- May 24, 2010
- 06:10 PM
- 464 views
Evidence Suggesting that Specialized Visual Regions Are Formed by Pruning in Early Childhood
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
There are quite a few specialized visual regions in the brain. For example, the fusiform face area (FFA) activates for faces, and the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left fusiform is consistently active for words.
How do these specialized...
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Cantlon JF, Pinel P, Dehaene S, & Pelphrey KA. (2010) Cortical Representations of Symbols, Objects, and Faces Are Pruned Back during Early Childhood. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991). PMID: 20457691
- May 18, 2010
- 06:49 PM
- 360 views
Multimodal Investigation of Reading in Children: More from Brem and Colleagues
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Advanced
Last time we read an article from Brem and colleagues that compared word processing in adolescents (age 15-17) and adults (19-30). In follow-up paper from 2009, Brem expanded the report to include children (9-11).
If you...
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Brem S, Halder P, Bucher K, Summers P, Martin E, & Brandeis D. (2009) Tuning of the visual word processing system: distinct developmental ERP and fMRI effects. Human brain mapping, 30(6), 1833-44. PMID: 19288464
- May 14, 2010
- 03:30 PM
- 665 views
Developmental Changes in Word Processing After Adolescence
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
When does brain development for reading stop? We often focus on school aged children, but what about the later teen years? To answer this question, Brem and colleagues tested adolescents (age 15-17) and adults (19-31) in a study using fMRI and...
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Brem S, Bucher K, Halder P, Summers P, Dietrich T, Martin E, & Brandeis D. (2006) Evidence for developmental changes in the visual word processing network beyond adolescence. NeuroImage, 29(3), 822-37. PMID: 16257546
- April 29, 2010
- 08:32 PM
- 577 views
Letter-sound Training in Children Causes Brain Specialization for Letters
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
My research focuses on the left occipitotemporal region. One area in this region, also commonly referred to as the visual word form area, has been shown to activate selectively for letters. Presumably, since reading is too recent a phenomenon to have...
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Brem S, Bach S, Kucian K, Guttorm TK, Martin E, Lyytinen H, Brandeis D, & Richardson U. (2010) Brain sensitivity to print emerges when children learn letter-speech sound correspondences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 20395549
- April 21, 2010
- 06:42 PM
- 494 views
Posterior Brain Differences in Children with Dyslexia
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
I realized after the last post that we haven’t actually spent much time discussing brain differences between dyslexic and nonimpaired readers. So today, I’m covering an earlier experiment by the...
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Shaywitz, B. (2002) Disruption of posterior brain systems for reading in children with developmental dyslexia. Biological Psychiatry, 52(2), 101-110. DOI: 10.1016/S0006-3223(02)01365-3
- April 15, 2010
- 12:07 PM
- 560 views
Phonological Training Changes Brain Activation in Dyslexic Children
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Note: Online Universities has included me in their list of top 50 female science bloggers. It’s not actually for this blog, but for my Brain Science and Creative Writing blog. Anyways, check out the list if you get a chance. There are lot of interesting bloggers.
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
We’ve looked at the neuroscience of dyslexia and how the dyslexic brain processes words.
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Shaywitz BA, Shaywitz SE, Blachman BA, Pugh KR, Fulbright RK, Skudlarski P, Mencl WE, Constable RT, Holahan JM, Marchione KE.... (2004) Development of left occipitotemporal systems for skilled reading in children after a phonologically- based intervention. Biological psychiatry, 55(9), 926-33. PMID: 15110736
- April 6, 2010
- 07:34 PM
- 516 views
The Development of Visual Word Recognition
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
We’ve looked at brain regions and development during word related tasks (word generation, reading and repeating), but we haven’t yet looked at a straight up study of word recognition and development.
What’s the best task to use to study visual word recognition? You can have people read out loud, but that involves processes like speech generation. Likewise, reading sentences or paragraphs
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Turkeltaub, P., Gareau, L., Flowers, D., Zeffiro, T., & Eden, G. (2003) Development of neural mechanisms for reading. Nature Neuroscience, 6(7), 767-773. DOI: 10.1038/nn1065
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