Reading, one of the most important cultural inventions of human society, critically depends on posterior brain areas of the left hemisphere in proficient adult readers. In children, this left hemispheric cortical specialization for letter strings is typically detected only after approximately 1 y of formal schooling and reading acquisition. Here, we recorded scalp electrophysiological (EEG) brain responses in 5-y-old (n = 40) prereaders presented with letter strings appearing every five items in rapid streams of pseudofonts (6 items per second). Within 2 min of recording only, letter strings evoked a robust specific response over the left occipito-temporal cortex at the predefined frequency of 1.2 Hz (i.e., 6 Hz/5). Interindividual differences in the amplitude of this electrophysiological response are significantly related to letter knowledge, a preschool predictor of later reading ability. These results point to the high potential of this rapidly collected behavior-free measure to assess reading ability in developmental populations. These findings were replicated in a second experiment (n = 26 preschool children), where familiar symbols and line drawings of objects evoked right-lateralized and bilaterally specific responses, respectively, showing the specificity of the early left hemispheric dominance for letter strings. Collectively, these findings indicate that limited knowledge of print in young children, before formal education, is sufficient to develop specialized left lateralized neuronal circuits, thereby pointing to an early onset and rapid impact of left hemispheric reentrant sound mapping on posterior cortical development.A dult expert reading, a complex yet effortless and fast process (i.e., occurring at an average of 200 ms per word; ref. 1), critically depends on the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex (2). This left hemispheric specialization is thought to arise during children's reading acquisition through reentrant mapping of sound representations in the left temporal and frontal cortices to letter representations in ipsilateral posterior areas (3-5). Even though the exact onset of this leftward specialization is not known, this process appears to take considerable time during formal reading acquisition (6-8).Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals the typical left lateralized adult-like brain pattern for letter strings only in proficient readers (ref. 9 for a metaanalysis) and in natural settings, significant left lateralization appears only when children have already acquired formal reading ability, approximately at 7 y of age (10). In developmental studies with direct measures of brain activity (electro/magneto-encephalography, EEG/MEG), the typical reading adult occipito-temporal response evoked by letter strings at approximately 200 ms after stimulus onset (i.e., N1 or N170; refs. 11 and 12) is absent in preschool children, even if they can already categorize or name letters. Typically, sensitivity to print has been shown after 1 y (13), or 1.5 y of schooling (14), thus, afte...

Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have been shown to be powerful predictors of reading achievement across many languages. However, literature remains unclear: (a) whether RAN is independent of PA, (b) about the specific influences of PA and RAN on reading and spelling, and (c) about the efficacy of a RAN intervention. This study aims to address these issues by means of an intervention design. Precisely, the objectives are (a) to determine whether training one competence involves or not an effect on the other, (b) to examine whether each intervention based on oral abilities (PA vs. RAN) could improve word reading and word spelling performances, and (c) to assess the efficacy of a RAN-objects’ intervention. Thirty-six French-speaking second graders, from two Belgian elementary schools, were divided into two groups, and received either a PA- or a RAN-objects’ intervention. Twenty-five-minute lessons took place at school twice a week over a period of 2 months. Both groups were compared on multiple experimental measures (PA, RAN, word reading, and word spelling), before and immediately after the intervention, and 6 months later. Results showed specific efficacy of the two interventions, with participants trained in one ability outperforming those from the other group on this specific ability at post-test. Moreover, the PA intervention revealed transfer effects on the sub-lexical processes of spelling, while the RAN intervention enhanced word reading speed. Finally, the results demonstrated the efficacy of a RAN-objects’ intervention for the first time. These findings provide a new piece of evidence showing the independence of PA and RAN, each process influencing the acquisition of literacy skills in a different way. The efficacy and the specific transfer effects of both interventions open up new perspectives for prevention and targeted remediation of reading disabilities.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract