We employed brain-behavior analyses to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing (all predictors of reading (dis)ability) and brain organization for print and speech in beginning readers. For print-related activation, we observed a shared set of skill-correlated regions, including left hemisphere temporoparietal and occipitotemporal sites, as well as inferior frontal, visual, visual attention, and subcortical components. For speech-related activation, shared variance among reading skill measures was most prominently correlated with activation in left hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus and precuneus. Implications for brain-based models of literacy acquisition are discussed.

When linguistic input contains inconsistent use of grammatical forms, children produce these forms more consistently, a process called "regularization." Deaf children learning American Sign Language from parents who are non-native users of the language regularize their parents' inconsistent usages. In studies of artificial languages containing inconsistently used morphemes, children, but not adults, regularized these forms. However, little is known about the precise circumstances in which such regularization occurs.In three experiments we investigate how the type of input variation and the age of learners affects regularization. Overall our results suggest that while adults tend to reproduce the inconsistencies found in their input, young children introduce regularity: they learn varying forms whose occurrence is conditioned and systematic, but they alter inconsistent variation to be more regular. Older children perform more like adults, suggesting that regularization changes with maturation and cognitive capacities.Learning a language is a daunting task. With little to no explicit instruction, young children must extract the relevant parts of the speech stream and learn the allowable combinations of sounds, words, and sentences. A central question is what biases and abilities allow children to learn a language so successfully. One mechanism hypothesized as part of this task is a sensitivity to the distributional statistics of the language environment. By tracking various statistics concerning the frequencies and co-occurrences of linguistic elements, young language learners can extract regularities at many levels, including phonology (

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