Easson Kaitlyn, Al Dahhan Noor Z, Brien Donald C, Kirby John R, Munoz Douglas P
Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2020 Dec 10;14:562712. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.562712. eCollection 2020.
Studying the typical development of reading is key to understanding the precise deficits that underlie reading disabilities. An important correlate of efficient reading is the speed of naming arrays of simple stimuli such as letters and pictures. In this cross-sectional study, we examined developmental changes in visual processing that occurs during letter and object naming from childhood to early adulthood in terms of behavioral task efficiency, associated articulation and eye movement parameters, and the coordination between them, as measured by eye-voice span in both the spatial and temporal domains. We used naming speed (NS) tasks, in which participants were required to name sets of letters or simple objects as quickly and as accurately as possible. Single stimulus manipulations were made to these tasks to make the stimuli either more visually and/or phonologically similar to one another in order to examine how these manipulations affected task performance and the coordination between speech and eye movements. Across development there was an increased efficiency in speech and eye movement performance and their coordination in both the spatial and temporal domains. Furthermore, manipulations to the phonological and visual similarity of specific letter and object stimuli revealed that orthographic processing played a greater role than phonological processing in performance, with the contribution of phonological processing diminishing across development. This comprehensive typical developmental trajectory provides a benchmark for clinical populations to elucidate the nature of the cognitive dysfunction underlying reading difficulties.
研究阅读的典型发展过程是理解阅读障碍背后确切缺陷的关键。高效阅读的一个重要相关因素是命名简单刺激物（如字母和图片）阵列的速度。在这项横断面研究中，我们从行为任务效率、相关的发音和眼动参数以及它们之间的协调性（通过空间和时间领域的眼声跨度来衡量）方面，研究了从童年到成年早期在字母和物体命名过程中发生的视觉处理的发展变化。我们使用了命名速度（NS）任务，要求参与者尽可能快速准确地命名字母集或简单物体。对这些任务进行单一刺激操作，使刺激物在视觉和/或语音上彼此更相似，以研究这些操作如何影响任务表现以及语音和眼动之间的协调性。在整个发展过程中，语音和眼动表现及其在空间和时间领域的协调性都有所提高。此外，对特定字母和物体刺激的语音和视觉相似性进行的操作表明，正字法处理在表现中比语音处理发挥了更大的作用，语音处理的贡献在整个发展过程中逐渐减少。这一全面的典型发展轨迹为临床人群阐明阅读困难背后认知功能障碍的本质提供了一个基准。
