Lecture 4 - Typical Reading

Question 1

Reading as a cultural skill

Answer 1

○ 3rd grade reading skill predicts future academic success (Salvin, 1994)
○ Up to 40% of 4th graders can’t read at basic level - most never catch up (National Assessment of educational progress, 2007)
○ Some US states estimates future needs for prison by 4th grade failure rates in reading (Lyon, 2001)
○ About 50% of adolescents with a history of substance abuse have reading difficulties
○ Use of oral language as along as homosapiens have been around, and maybe even earlier human species
○ Skript/reading a rather young cultural invention, about 4000 to 5000 years
○ Evolutionary too recent to have resulted in dedicated brain circuits
○ Our brain originally not shaped for reading
○ Reading not hard-wired in the brain

Question 2

reading as a perceptual process - the eye

Answer 2

• The eye: a poor scanner
  ○ Foveal focus required
  ○ Outside fovea blurry
  ○ What we experience around this is constructed from memory
  ○ McConkie and Rayner 1975

Question 3

2 routes for reading

Answer 3

spelling to sound (phonological route)

semantic

Question 4

which route is intact in surface dyslexia

Answer 4

phonological intact

Question 5

which route is intact in deep dyslexia

Answer 5

semantic intact

Question 6

first studies on reading in the brain

Answer 6

• First lesion studies Dejerine 1892
  
  • Patient C
    ○ After stroke loss of ability to read letters and words
    ○ Hardly able to write letters
    ○ Spared spoken language
    ○ Spared object/face recognition
    ○ Spared reading of numbers

Question 7

first neuroimaging studies for reading

Answer 7

Peterson et al., 1989 using PET
○ Substantial critical involvement of left occipito-temporal areas in reading

Question 8

language development

Answer 8

• Few days after birth infants can discriminate sounds ba and ga
  
  • They pay special attention to the rhythm of their native language
  • This is already associated with activation in left-hemispheric language networks –> genetic disposition
  • Learns 10 to 20 new words a day and grammatical rule at 2 years old
  • By age of 5 to 6 they have expert knowledge on phonology

Question 9

visual development

Answer 9

• After a few months system can parse visual scenes into objects and track them
  
  • Discriminating objects based on contours, texture and internal organisation
  • First inferences about 3D shape based on edges and junctions
  • At 5 to 6 years old key invariant visual recognition processes are in place (e.g. location)

Question 10

3 stages of reading acquisition according to Frith 1985

Answer 10

1. Logographic/pictorial stage
   a. 5-6 years old
   b. Not yet grasped logic of writing
   c. Visual recognition of words as though they were objects relying on shape, colour, orientation etc
   d. Recognises their name and some striking words like brand names
   e. Frequent errors
   
   2. Phonological stage
      a. Child learns to attend to smaller units such as letter/graphemes
      b. Starts linking graphemes to corresponding speech sounds and practices assembling them
      c. Reading instruction leads to explicit representation of speech sounds made up by phonemes
      d. Phonemic awareness
      e. Reading through grapheme to phoneme conversion
   3. Orthographic stage
      a. Children build lexicon of visual units/graphemes
      b. Emergence of word frequency and neighbourhood effects
      c. Indicates gradual establishment of lexical reading pathway