Emotion words constitute a special class of verbal stimuli which can quickly activate the limbic system outside the left-hemisphere language network. Such fast response to emotion words may arise independently of the left occipitotemporal area involved in visual word-form analysis and rely on a distinct amygdala-dependent emotion circuit involved in fearful face processing. Using a hemifield priming paradigm with fMRI, we explored how the left and right amygdala systems interact with the reading network during emotion word processing. On each trial, participants viewed a centrally presented target which was preceded by a masked prime flashed either to the left or right visual field. Primes and targets, each denoting negative or positive nouns, could be either affectively congruent or incongruent with each other. We observed that affective congruency produced parallel changes in neural priming between the left frontal and parietotemporal regions and the bilateral amygdala. However, we also found that the left, but not right, amygdala exhibited significant change in functional connectivity with the neural components of reading as a function of affective congruency. Collectively, these results suggest that emotion words activate the bilateral amygdala during early stages of emotion word processing, whereas only the left amygdala exerts a long-distance regulatory influence over the reading network via its strong within-hemisphere connectivity.

The contribution of cognitive abilities and home literacy activities to early reading and spelling skills of Japanese Hiragana were investigated in a cross-sectional study of 243 Japanese-speaking upper kindergarten children. They were tested in phonological awareness (nonword repetition and word repetition in reversed order), rapid automatized naming (RAN), visual cognition, receptive vocabulary, and reading and spelling of Hiragana characters. Parents filled in a questionnaire about home literacy activities, frequency of home reading and parent teaching. For reading, the scores of RAN, word repetition in

In this study, we investigated the attainment level of reading and spelling of Hiragana characters in 230 kindergarten children using the same method employed in earlier studies conducted by the National Language Research Institute (1972) and Shimamura and Mikami (1994). The tested children read 64.9 and spelled 43.0 out of 71 characters correctly on average. These results were similar to those of Shimamura and Mikami's report. Analysis of variance revealed the main effect of gender in the spelling task. The score of girls was higher than that of boys. This result coincides with the earlier study.

Abstract:We developed a new test of long-term memory, the Figure Learning