Department of Neurology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria.
PLoS One. 2012;7(5):e38201. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038201. Epub 2012 May 31.
Previous fMRI studies in English-speaking samples suggested that specific interventions may alter brain function in language-relevant networks in children with reading and spelling difficulties, but this research strongly focused on reading impaired individuals. Only few studies so far investigated characteristics of brain activation associated with poor spelling ability and whether a specific spelling intervention may also be associated with distinct changes in brain activity patterns. We here investigated such effects of a morpheme-based spelling intervention on brain function in 20 children with comparatively poor spelling and reading abilities using repeated fMRI. Relative to 10 matched controls, children with comparatively poor spelling and reading abilities showed increased activation in frontal medial and right hemispheric regions and decreased activation in left occipito-temporal regions prior to the intervention, during processing of a lexical decision task. After five weeks of intervention, spelling and reading comprehension significantly improved in the training group, along with increased activation in the left temporal, parahippocampal and hippocampal regions. Conversely, the waiting group showed increases in right posterior regions. Our findings could indicate an increased left temporal activation associated with the recollection of the new learnt morpheme-based strategy related to successful training.
先前的 fMRI 研究表明，在英语为母语的样本中，特定的干预措施可能会改变阅读和拼写困难儿童语言相关网络中的大脑功能，但这项研究主要集中在阅读障碍者身上。到目前为止，只有少数研究调查了与拼写能力差相关的大脑激活特征，以及特定的拼写干预是否也可能与大脑活动模式的明显变化相关。我们在这里使用重复 fMRI 研究了 20 名拼写和阅读能力相对较差的儿童接受基于词素的拼写干预对大脑功能的影响。与 10 名匹配的对照组相比，在干预前，进行词汇判断任务时，拼写和阅读能力相对较差的儿童在前额叶内侧和右半球区域的激活增加，而在左枕颞叶区域的激活减少。干预五周后，训练组的拼写和阅读理解能力显著提高，左侧颞叶、海马旁回和海马区域的激活增加。相反，等待组的右侧后区增加。我们的发现可能表明，与成功训练相关的新习得的基于词素的策略的回忆与左侧颞叶的激活增加有关。
