Reading and Spelling Skills Are Differentially Related to Phonological Processing: Behavioral and FMRI Study

Overview

Journal Dev Cogn Neurosci

Publisher Elsevier

Specialties Neurology
Psychiatry

Date 2019 Aug 5

PMID 31377570

Citations 16

Authors

Agnieszka Debska

Katarzyna Chyl

Gabriela Dziegiel

Agnieszka Kacprzak

Magdalena Luniewska

Joanna Plewko

Artur Marchewka

Anna Grabowska

Katarzyna Jednorog

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The manuscript reports a study on a large sample (N = 170) of Polish speaking 8-13 year old children, whose brain activation was measured in relation to tasks that require auditory phonological processing. We aimed to relate brain activation to individual differences in reading and spelling. We found that individual proficiency in both reading and spelling significantly correlated with activation of the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex encompassing the Visual Word Form Area which has been implicated in automatic orthographic activations. Reading but not spelling was found to correlate with activation in the left anterior dorsal stream (anterior supramarginal and postcentral gyri). Our results indicate that the level of both reading and spelling is related to activity in areas involved in the storage of fine-grained orthographic representations. However, only the reading level is uniquely related to activity of regions responsible for the articulation, motor planning and grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence, which form the basis for effective decoding skill.

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