The interaction between orthographic and phonological information in children: an fMRI study.
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 (staff-gain); in conflicting conditions, words had (3) similar phonology and different orthography (jazz-has) 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 orthographic and phonological processing.
Bitan
Tali
T
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Haifa University, Haifa, Israel. abitan@univ.haifa.ac.il
Burman
Douglas D
DD
Chou
Tai-Li
TL
Lu
Dong
D
Cone
Nadia E
NE
Cao
Fan
F
Bigio
Jordan D
JD
Booth
James R
JR
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006309:Hearing / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D007802:Language; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*