The cognitive and neural bases of letter and sound knowledge in reading

印刷文字是人类的一项极具价值的创新。它允许语言使用者记录他们的想法和想法，并将它们传达给其他没有立即在场的人。然而，流利的阅读需要读者将多种类型的知觉信息和心理知识结合在一起，以处理一篇书面文本。本提案考察了阅读的一个基本要素：将语言的视觉形式--正字法--与语言的口语形式--音系学--迅速融合起来。我们的理论是，这种视听(A-V)整合过程代表了阅读的基本组成部分，为学龄儿童有效的阅读习得和熟练读者的高效视觉单词识别奠定了基础。 这笔探索基金将资助马克·乔尼斯博士和他在西安大略大学语言、阅读和认知神经科学实验室的研究团队。我们提出了一个多模式的实验方法，在这个方法中，我们将使用事件相关电位(ERPs)和功能磁共振成像(FMRI)来研究阅读的大脑基础。在一系列实验中，我们将考察典型阅读成年人和不同年龄学龄儿童的字母-声音加工。虽然我们主要关注的是字母语言英语的阅读，但我们也会在阅读中文的过程中研究这些过程，中文是一种几乎不包含语音提示的标志文字。结果将寻求揭示儿童和成人视觉和书面语言的快速和自动整合。它们将使我们能够在成人和儿童中分离特定于阅读的A-V整合的神经标记；解决此类标记是否为书面语言所独有的问题；明确它们是通用的还是仅出现在字母语言中；以及确定这些神经标记如何与熟练阅读和阅读发展的不同方面相关。这一结果也将对改善脑损伤后阅读障碍和阅读障碍的诊断和治疗产生深远的影响。

The printed word is an immensely valuable human innovation. It allows a language user to record their thoughts and ideas, and to convey them to other individuals who are not immediately present. Nevertheless, fluent reading requires readers to bring together multiple types of perceptual information and mental knowledge in order process a written text. The present proposal examines a fundamental element of reading: rapidly merging the visual form of language - orthography - with knowledge of the spoken form of language - phonology. We theorize that this audio-visual (A-V) integration process represents a fundamental building block of reading, setting the stage for effective reading acquisition in school-age children and efficient visual word recognition in skilled readers. This Discovery Grant will fund Dr. Marc Joanisse and his research team in the Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Western Ontario. We propose a multi-modal experimental approach in which we will study the brain bases of reading using both event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In a series of experiments we will examine letter-sound processing in groups of typical reading adults and in school-age children of varying ages. While the primary focus is on reading in English, an alphabetic language, we will also investigate these processes in reading Chinese, a logographic script that contains very few phonetic cues. The results will seek to uncover the rapid and automatic integration of visual and written language in both children and adults. They will allow us to isolate neural markers of reading-specific A-V integration in both adults and children; address whether such markers are unique to written language; specify whether they are universal or occur only for alphabetic languages; and identify how these neural markers are related to different aspects of skilled reading and reading development. The results will also have far-reaching implications for the improved diagnosis and treatment of dyslexia and reading disorders following brain injury.