The interaction between orthographic and phonological information in children: An fMRI study

Abstract

We examined the neural representations of orthographic and phonological processing in children, while manipulating the consistency between orthographic and phonological information. Participants, aged 9-15, were scanned while performing rhyming and spelling judgments on pairs of visually presented words. The orthographic and phonological similarity between words in the pair was independently manipulated, resulting in four conditions. In the nonconflicting conditions, both orthography and phonology of the words were either (1) similar (lime-dime) or (2) different (staffgain); in conflicting conditions, words had (3) similar phonology and different orthography (jazzhas) or (4) different phonology and similar orthography (pint-mint). The comparison between tasks resulted in greater activation for the rhyming task in bilateral inferior frontal gyri (BA 45/47), and greater activation for the spelling task in bilateral inferior/superior parietal lobules (BA 40/7), suggesting greater involvement of phonological and semantic processing in the rhyming task, and nonlinguistic spatial processing in the spelling task. Conflicting conditions were more difficult in both tasks and resulted in greater activation in the above regions. The results suggest that when children encounter inconsistency between orthographic and phonological information they show greater engagement of both ortho-graphic and phonological processing.

Pseudohomophone effects provide evidence of early lexico‐phonological processing in visual word recognition

“…In support of this interpretation is a recent study by Bitan et al (2007) who showed that children engage in automatic orthographic and phonological processing regardless of task requirements. Bitan et al manipulated orthographic and phonologial similarity between visually presented word pairs and compared conflicting and non-conflicting conditions in spelling and rhyme judgments.…”

Apraxia of speech from a right frontal lesion

“…Agraphia with impaired phonology-to-orthography conversion is found after parietal (Hillis, 2008;Roeltgen, Sevush, & Heilman, 1983) and occasionally also after dominant posterior-inferior frontal infarcts (Hillis, Chang et al, 2004;Marien et al, 2001). Furthermore, functional imaging (Sugihara, Kaminaga, & Sugishita, 2006), developmental (Bitan et al, 2007;Booth et al, 2004) and stimulation studies (Lubrano, Roux, & Demonet, 2004), as well as clinical observations (Ritaccio, Hickling, & Ramani, 1992) showed that dominant premotor areas are strongly involved in phoneme-to-grapheme conversion during spelling and writing. Finally, poor performance on a silent rhyming task and a decreased digit span are consistent with the assumption that apraxia of speech may interfere with working memory tasks through an impairment of 'inner speech' processes (Waters, Rochon, & Caplan, 1992;Ziegler, 2008).…”

Similarities and differences in brain activation and functional connectivity in first and second language reading: Evidence from Chinese learners of English

“…We found that the connectivity between the right MOG and the left supramarginal gyrus was correlated with higher accuracy in the CE group. The left inferior parietal lobule, including the supramarginal gyrus, has been found to be involved in orthography-phonologymapping during reading in previous studies (Booth et al, 2002), and greater involvement of this region is associated with higher reading skills in English monolingual speakers (Bitan et al, 2007;Shaywitz et al, 1998). A recent study also provides confirmatory evidence by showing that high frequency repetitive TMS, over the left IPL, improves non-word reading accuracy in Italian (Costanzo, Menghini, Caltagirone, Oliveri, & Vicari, 2012), suggesting the essential role of this region in grapheme-phoneme-conversion.…”