Wang Fang, Karipidis Iliana I, Pleisch Georgette, Fraga-González Gorka, Brem Silvia
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2020 Aug 14;14:289. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00289. eCollection 2020.
Learning print-speech sound correspondences is a crucial step at the beginning of reading acquisition and often impaired in children with developmental dyslexia. Despite increasing insight into audiovisual language processing, it remains largely unclear how integration of print and speech develops at the neural level during initial learning in the first years of schooling. To investigate this development, 32 healthy, German-speaking children at varying risk for developmental dyslexia (17 typical readers and 15 poor readers) participated in a longitudinal study including behavioral and fMRI measurements in first (T1) and second (T2) grade. We used an implicit audiovisual (AV) non-word target detection task aimed at characterizing differential activation to congruent (AVc) and incongruent (AVi) audiovisual non-word pairs. While children's brain activation did not differ between AVc and AVi pairs in first grade, an incongruency effect (AVi > AVc) emerged in bilateral inferior temporal and superior frontal gyri in second grade. Of note, pseudoword reading performance improvements with time were associated with the development of the congruency effect (AVc > AVi) in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) from first to second grade. Finally, functional connectivity analyses indicated divergent development and reading expertise dependent coupling from the left occipito-temporal and superior temporal cortex to regions of the default mode (precuneus) and fronto-temporal language networks. Our results suggest that audiovisual integration areas as well as their functional coupling to other language areas and areas of the default mode network show a different development in poor vs. typical readers at varying familial risk for dyslexia.
学习印刷体与语音的对应关系是阅读习得初期的关键一步，而发育性阅读障碍儿童在这方面常常受损。尽管人们对视听语言处理的认识不断深入，但在入学后的最初几年，印刷体和语音在神经层面的整合在初始学习过程中是如何发展的，目前仍不清楚。为了研究这一发展过程，32名有不同发育性阅读障碍风险的健康德语儿童（17名典型阅读者和15名阅读能力差的儿童）参与了一项纵向研究，该研究包括一年级（T1）和二年级（T2）时的行为测量和功能磁共振成像（fMRI）测量。我们使用了一项隐性视听（AV）非单词目标检测任务，旨在表征对一致（AVc）和不一致（AVi）视听非单词对的差异激活。虽然一年级儿童在AVc和AVi对之间的大脑激活没有差异，但在二年级时，双侧颞下回和额上回出现了不一致效应（AVi > AVc）。值得注意的是，随着时间的推移，假词阅读表现的改善与一年级到二年级时左侧后颞上回（STG）中一致性效应（AVc > AVi）的发展相关。最后，功能连接分析表明，从左枕颞叶和颞上皮质到默认模式区域（楔前叶）和额颞语言网络的发展和阅读专业知识依赖性耦合存在差异。我们的结果表明，在不同家族性阅读障碍风险的情况下，视听整合区域及其与其他语言区域和默认模式网络区域的功能耦合在阅读能力差的儿童和典型阅读者中表现出不同的发展。
