Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Lightning Talks
Longitudinal analysis of letter and speech sound association
There is a Poster PDF for this presentation, but you must be a current member or registered to attend SNL 2023 to view it. Please go to your Account Home page to register.
Poster E95 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Joanna Beck1, Katarzyna Jednorog1; 1Laboratory of Language Neurobiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland
The first and critical step for reading development is learning letter-speech sound (LS) association. LS integration was extensively studied in adults and children using cross-sectional designs, with a consensus that the left superior temporal cortex is the integration site (Blau et al. 2009). Relatively little is known about the development of LS integration in children on both behavioral and neuronal levels, which constitutes my research's goal. On a behavioral level, Polish children from kindergarten to 8th grade participated in an experiment with a computer-based letter and speech sound discrimination task in which they had to judge whether letters match phonemes. Results showed that children learned accurate LS association within one year of reading instruction. Still, they needed more time (around three years) to automate this ability, as reflected by decreasing reaction times. On the neuronal level, using a simple fMRI task (four experimental conditions: letters, speech sounds, congruent, and incongruent LS pairs), we measured LS integration on two levels: lower, more fundamental sensory aspects were examined by looking at the super-additive effect, and higher, orthographic and phonological aspects by the congruency effect. In the longitudinal fMRI study (N = 67), we found significant changes in the pattern of brain activation during the first two years of formal education. While the brain activity in sensory areas decreased in response to unimodally presented speech sounds and letters, it increased when children processed multimodal LS pairs. Namely, sub-additive effects reverse into super-additive effects in superior temporal areas. We did not observe changes in time for the congruency effect. Thirty children returned for an additional scan in the 8th grade of primary school (third-time point). I will present the pattern of brain activation in children who have already automatized LS integration and higher levels of LS integration. We did not observe the time effect in the congruence effect. We speculate if the results are more connected to the developmental step or that our paradigm can not track differences in such small units as letters in children in transparent orthographies, such as Polish.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Reading