Brain activation in developmental communication disorder

描述(由申请者提供)：这个项目的目标是开发和测试适合年龄的词汇任务，以区分正常发育的儿童和有沟通障碍的儿童(阅读能力差和语音阅读困难)。阅读不良者往往在语义加工方面有语言问题的历史，并在拼写和语音之间的解码方面有缺陷，而语音阅读障碍在解码方面有特殊的缺陷。我们希望在功能性磁共振成像(FMRI)期间区分这些组的大脑激活模式。我们提出了一个按时间顺序的年龄匹配(12岁)和一个阅读水平匹配(9岁的正常发育儿童与患有沟通障碍的较大儿童匹配)的实验设计，这样我们就可以检查发育延迟与缺陷的问题。我们希望能够在词汇加工的特定方面区分这些群体，所以我们的功能激活任务被设计成检验内通道加工(听觉押韵和视觉拼写任务)、跨通道加工(听觉拼写和视觉押韵任务)和非通道单词理解(听觉和视觉意义任务)。我们预计语音阅读障碍者和阅读不良者在两种模式的拼写和押韵任务中都会表现出异常，而只有阅读不良者才会在听觉语义任务中表现出异常。为了能够更清楚地将组差异归因于词汇加工，我们将使用多基线(简单与复杂)和参数难度操作(拼写和押韵任务的单词对的拼写/语音一致性，以及语义任务的联想强度)。这个项目将提供任务、一种实验方法和一种方法来评估患有沟通障碍的群体之间的差异，这些可能被用作诊断和干预工具。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to develop and test age appropriate lexical tasks to differentiate between children who are normally developing and children with communication disorders (poor readers and phonological dyslexics). Poor readers tend to have a history of language problems in semantic processing coupled with deficits in decoding between orthography and phonology, whereas phonological dyslexics have a specific deficit in decoding. We wish to differentiate between these groups in patterns of brain activation during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We propose a chronological age match (12-year-olds) and a reading level match (9-year-old normally developing children matched to older children with communication disorders) experimental design so that we can examine issues of developmental delay versus deficit. We expect that we will able to differentiate between these groups in specific aspects of lexical processing, so our functional activation tasks are designed to examine intra-modal processing (auditory rhyming and visual spelling tasks), cross-modal processing (auditory spelling and visual rhyming tasks) and amodal word comprehension (auditory and visual meaning tasks). We expect that both the phonological dyslexics and poor readers will show abnormalities during the spelling and rhyming tasks in the two modalities, whereas we expect that only the poor readers will show abnormalities during the auditory semantic task. In order to be able to more clearly attribute group differences to lexical processing, we wilt use multiple baselines (simple versus complex) and a parametric difficulty manipulation (orthographic/phonologic consistency in word pairs for spelling and rhyming tasks and association strength for the semantic tasks). This project will provide tasks, an experimental approach, and a method for evaluating differences between groups with communication disorders that could potentially be used as a diagnostic and intervention tool.