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PubMed2005

Cortical activation during reading of ancient versus modern Japanese texts: fMRI study.

The purpose of this study was to investigate human brain activity during the reading of ancient Japanese texts using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Thirty right-handed normal Japanese subjects performed two reading tasks: covert reading of (1) ancient and (2) modern Japanese text. Common areas are activated during both tasks. Activity in the left inferior frontal cortices increased during the reading of ancient Japanese text compared with the reading of modern Japanese text, whereas occipital activity increased during the reading of modern Japanese text. Our results indicate that ancient Japanese language may be processed as a foreign language.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

How reading differs from object naming at the neuronal level.

This paper uses whole brain functional neuroimaging in neurologically normal participants to explore how reading aloud differs from object naming in terms of neuronal implementation. In the first experiment, we directly compared brain activation during reading aloud and object naming. This revealed greater activation for reading in bilateral premotor, left posterior superior temporal and precuneus regions. In a second experiment, we segregated the object-naming system into object recognition and speech production areas by factorially manipulating the presence or absence of objects (pictures of objects or their meaningless scrambled counterparts) with the presence or absence of speech production (vocal vs. finger press responses). This demonstrated that the areas associated with speech production (object naming and repetitively saying "OK" to meaningless scrambled pictures) corresponded exactly to the areas where responses were higher for reading aloud than object naming in Experiment 1. Collectively the results suggest that, relative to object naming, reading increases the demands on shared speech production processes. At a cognitive level, enhanced activation for reading in speech production areas may reflect the multiple and competing phonological codes that are generated from the sublexical parts of written words. At a neuronal level, it may reflect differences in the speed with which different areas are activated and integrate with one another.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Differing neuropsychological and neuroanatomical correlates of abnormal reading in early-stage semantic dementia and dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Individuals with semantic dementia (SD) were differentiated neuropsychologically from individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) at very mild-to-mild stages (clinical dementia rating 0.5 or 1). A picture naming and recognition memory experiment provided a particularly useful probe for early identification, with SD individuals showing preserved picture recognition memory and impaired naming, and DAT individuals tending to show the reverse dissociation. The identification of an early SD group provided the opportunity to inform models of reading by exploring the influence of isolated lexical semantic impairment on reading regular words. Results demonstrated prolonged latency in both SD and DAT group reading compared to a control group but exaggerated influence of frequency and length only for the SD group. The SD reading pattern was associated with focal atrophy of the left temporal pole. These cognitive-neuroanatomical findings suggest a role for the left temporal pole in lexical/semantic components of reading and demonstrate that cortical thickness differences in the left temporal pole correlate with prolonged latency associated with increased reliance on sublexical components of reading.

Aged↗
PubMed2006

Left lateralized white matter microstructure accounts for individual differences in reading ability and disability.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) was used to investigate the association between variation in white matter microstructure and individual differences in reading skill within children. Unlike previous DTI studies of reading, our sample examined children in both the average reading range as well as several children in the performance range of reading disability (RD). Results replicate previous findings of a strong correlation between fractional anisotropy (FA) values in a left temporo-parietal white matter region and standardized reading scores of typically developing children. Furthermore, FA values in this same region accounted for differences between children scoring in the average range and children scoring in the RD range, suggesting that the role of white matter tract microstructure is best characterized as an extreme range on a continuum of typical variation. Furthermore, significant correlations between working memory and frontal white matter tract regions were present in this same population, yet were demonstrated to be independent of the relationships found between reading and more posterior regions. Results form a "correlational double dissociation" that demonstrates domain specificity in the influence of white matter tract structures to individual differences in cognitive performance.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Alexia and quadrant-amblyopia: reading disability after a minor visual field deficit.

Reading difficulties caused by hemianopia are well described. We present a study of alexia in a patient (NT) with a milder visual field deficit. The patient had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage causing damage to the left occipital cortex and underlying white matter. NT's text reading was slow and prone to error, but recognition of single letters was preserved. Single word reading was accurate, but slower than normal. On perimetric testing NT initially showed an upper right quadrantanopia, but by attending covertly to this quadrant he could achieve luminance detection except in a small scotoma above the reading line. A whole report experiment showed that letter perception was severely compromised in the quadrant, consistent with cerebral amblyopia. On follow-up testing one and a half year post stroke, a clear spontaneous recovery had occurred, reflected in improved text reading with close to normal eye movements. Still, subtle reading difficulties and oculo-motor abnormalities remained. Overall, the study shows how amblyopia in one quadrant can lead to a characteristic form of alexia.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Isolating the impact of visual perception on dyslexics' reading ability.

A large body of data suggests that phonological deficits play an important causal role in dyslexics' reading difficulties. The functional role of visual impairments is still highly debated. Many recent studies have shown clear visual deficits in large subgroups of dyslexics. However, the relationship between these deficits and visual routines required for reading is not clear. To assess the direct contribution of visual factors to dyslexics' slower and less accurate reading, we composed a task that was similar to single word reading in its basic visual characteristics, but had none of the other (phonological, morphological, semantic, etc.) aspects of reading. Young adult dyslexics, with average or above general cognitive abilities, and controls matched for age and cognitive skills participated in the study. We measured both SOA and contrast thresholds for identifying unfamiliar letters. Letters were chosen from an alphabet graphically similar to Hebrew and English (a subset of Georgian letters), but unfamiliar to the subjects. Effects of decreasing letter size, increasing letter crowding (by adding a flanker letter on each side) and adding white noise, were measured. Dyslexics performed as well as controls under all test conditions, and had similar effect sizes. We thus conclude that, despite the data showing that dyslexics have marked difficulties with single word reading, the cause of these difficulties is not a visual processing deficit.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Acuity, crowding, reading and fixation stability.

People with age-related macular disease frequently experience reading difficulty that could be attributed to poor acuity, elevated crowding or unstable fixation associated with peripheral visual field dependence. We examine how the size, location, spacing and instability of retinal images affect the visibility of letters and words at different eccentricities. Fixation instability was simulated in normally sighted observers by randomly jittering single or crowded letters or words along a circular arc of fixed eccentricity. Visual performance was assessed at different levels of instability with forced choice measurements of acuity, crowding and reading speed in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. In the periphery: (1) acuity declined; (2) crowding increased for acuity- and eccentricity-corrected targets; and (3), the rate of reading fell with acuity-, crowding- and eccentricity-corrected targets. Acuity and crowding were unaffected by even high levels of image instability. However, reading speed decreased with image instability, even though the visibility of the component letters was unaffected. The results show that reading performance cannot be standardised across the visual field by correcting the size, spacing and eccentricity of letters or words. The results suggest that unstable fixation may contribute to reading difficulties in people with low vision and therefore that rehabilitation may benefit from fixation training.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Disruption of posterior brain systems for reading in children with developmental dyslexia.

BACKGROUND: Converging evidence indicates a functional disruption in the neural systems for reading in adults with dyslexia. We examined brain activation patterns in dyslexic and nonimpaired children during pseudoword and real-word reading tasks that required phonologic analysis (i.e., tapped the problems experienced by dyslexic children in sounding out words). METHODS: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study 144 right-handed children, 70 dyslexic readers, and 74 nonimpaired readers as they read pseudowords and real words. RESULTS: Children with dyslexia demonstrated a disruption in neural systems for reading involving posterior brain regions, including parietotemporal sites and sites in the occipitotemporal area. Reading skill was positively correlated with the magnitude of activation in the left occipitotemporal region. Activation in the left and right inferior frontal gyri was greater in older compared with younger dyslexic children. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide neurobiological evidence of an underlying disruption in the neural systems for reading in children with dyslexia and indicate that it is evident at a young age. The locus of the disruption places childhood dyslexia within the same neurobiological framework as dyslexia, and acquired alexia, occurring in adults.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Semantically-triggered reading epilepsy: an experimental case study.

Primary reading epilepsy (PRE) is a rare syndrome in which epileptic seizures are electively provoked by reading. Cognitive neuropsychology has demonstrated the existence of at least two pathways for reading, the sublexical pathway involved in converting graphemes to phonemes, and the lexical pathway used when meaning is conveyed. Which of these specific pathways is relevant in triggering epileptic discharges remains largely unknown. We report the case of a patient suffering from PRE in which the two routes were distinguished on the basis of the reading material employed. Significantly less epileptic discharges were observed when the patient read non-words than words. In view of our findings, we tentatively contrast a lexical form of PRE, triggered by the activation of semantic knowledge structures, with a sublexical form, triggered by non-word reading. Evidence from the literature suggests that the former is characterized by bilateral EEG activating patterns, whereas the latter involves preferentially the left hemisphere.

Electroencephalography↗
PubMed2003

Visual motion sensitivity and reading.

Reading is more difficult than speaking because an arbitrary set of visual symbols must be rapidly identified, ordered and translated into the sounds they represent. Many poor readers have particular problems with the rapid visual processing required for these tasks because they have a mild impairment of the visual magnocellular system. This deficit has been demonstrated using neuropathological, evoked potential, functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychophysical techniques. The sensitivity of the M-system in both good and bad readers correlates with their orthographic abilities, suggesting that the M-system plays an important part in their development. This role is probably to mediate steady direction of visual attention and eye fixations on words. Thus many children with reading difficulties have unsteady eye control and this causes the letters they are trying to read to appear to move around, so that they cannot tell what order they are meant to be in. Therefore, boosting M-performance using yellow filters, or training eye fixation, can improve reading performance very significantly. Several genetic linkage studies have associated reading difficulties with the MHC control region on the short arm of chromosome 6. This system has recently been shown to help regulate the differentiation of M-cells. This association could also explain the high incidence of autoimmune conditions in poor readers. Other chromosomal sites are associated with the metabolism of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) as found in fish oils, and this could explain why PUFA supplements can improve reading.

Attention↗
PubMed1997

Psychophysics of reading--XVI. The visual span in normal and low vision.

The visual span in reading is the number of characters that can be recognized at a glance. The shrinking visual span hypothesis attributes reading deficits in low vision, and slow reading in normal vision at low contrast, to a reduction in the visual span. This hypothesis predicts that reading time (msec/word) becomes increasingly dependent on word length as text contrast decreases. We tested and confirmed this prediction using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) method. Estimates of the visual span ranged from about 10 characters for high-contrast text to less than two characters for low-contrast text. Eye-movement recordings showed that longer reading times at low contrast are partitioned about equally between prolonged fixation times and an increased number of saccades (presumably related to a reduced visual span). RSVP measurements for six out of seven low-vision subjects revealed a strong dependence of reading time on word length, as expected from reduced visual spans.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Reading with simulated scotomas: attending to the right is better than attending to the left.

Persons with central field loss must learn to read using eccentric retina. To do this, most adopt a preferred retinal locus (PRL), which substitutes for the fovea. Patients who have central field loss due to age-related macular degeneration (AMD), most often adopt PRL adjacent to and to the left of their scotoma in visual field space. It has been hypothesized that this arrangement of PRL and scotoma would benefit reading. We tested this hypothesis by asking normally-sighted subjects to read with the left or right half of their visual field plus 3.2 degrees in the contralateral field masked from view. Letter identification, word identification, and reading were all slower when only the information in the left visual field was available. This was primarily due to the number of saccades required to successfully read to stimuli. These data imply that patients would be better off with PRL to the right of their scotoma than to the left for the purposes of reading.

Eye Movements↗
PubMed1999

Eye movement control in reading: accounting for initial fixation locations and refixations within the E-Z Reader model.

Reilly and O'Regan (1998, Vision Research, 38, 303-317) used computer simulations to evaluate how well several different word-targeting strategies could account for results which show that the distributions of fixation locations in reading are systematically related to low-level oculomotor variables, such as saccade distance and launch site [McConkie, Kerr, Reddix & Zola, (1988). Vision Research, 28, 1107-1118]. Their simulation results suggested that fixation locations are primarily determined by word length information, and that the processing of language, such as the identification of words, plays only a minimal role in deciding where to move the eyes. This claim appears to be problematic for our model of eye movement control in reading, E-Z Reader [Rayner, Reichle & Pollatsek (1998). Eye movement control in reading: an overview and model. In G. Underwood, Eye guidance in reading and scene perception (pp. 243-268). Oxford, UK: Elsevier; Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher & Rayner (1998). Psychological Review, 105, 125-157], because it assumes that lexical access is the engine that drives the eyes forward during reading. However, we show that a newer version of E-Z Reader which still assumes that lexical access is the engine driving eye movements also predicts the locations of fixations and within-word refixations, and therefore provides a viable framework for understanding how both linguistic and oculomotor variables affect eye movements in reading.

Eye Movements↗
PubMed1999

Statistical properties of open reading frames in complete genome sequences.

Some statistical properties of open reading frames in all currently available complete genome sequences are analyzed (seventeen prokatyotic genomes, and 16 chromosome sequences from the yeast genome). The size distribution of open reading frames is characterized by various techniques, such as quantile tables, QQ-plots, rank-size plots (Zipf's plots), and spatial densities. The issue of the influence of CG% on the size distribution is addressed. When yeast chromosomes are compared with archaeal and eubacterial genomes, they tend to have more long open reading frames. There is little or no evidence to reject the null hypothesis that open reading frames on six different reading frames and two strands distribute similarly. A topic of current interest, the base composition asymmetry in open reading frames between the two strands, is studied using regression analysis. The base composition asymmetry at three codon positions is analyzed separately. It was shown in these genome sequences that the first codon position is G- and A-rich (i.e. purine-rich); there is a co-existence of A- and T-rich branches at the second codon position; and the third codon position is weakly T-rich.

Base Sequence↗
PubMed1996

Fixation patterns and reading rates in eyes with central scotomas from advanced atrophic age-related macular degeneration and Stargardt disease.

PURPOSE: To study fixation patterns and reading rates in eyes with central scotomas from geographic atrophy (GA) of age-related macular degeneration and to compare fixation patterns with those of patients with Stargardt disease. METHODS: Scanning laser ophthalmoscope analysis of fixation patterns in eyes with 20/80 to 20/200 visual acuity. Included were 41 eyes of 35 patients with GA and 10 eyes of 5 patients with Stargardt disease. The patients with GA also were tested for maximum reading rate, and the size of the areas of atrophy were measured by fundus photograph analysis. RESULTS: Sixty-three percent of GA eyes fixating outside the atrophy placed the scotoma to the right of fixation in visual field space, 22% placed the scotoma above fixation, and 15% placed it to the left, regardless of the laterality of the GA eye. Fixation was stable in subsequent years of testing for scotoma placement to the right of or above fixation. All GA eyes fixated immediately adjacent to the atrophy. In contrast, seven of ten eyes with Stargardt disease fixated at a considerable distance from the scotoma border, with the dense scotoma far above the fixation site in visual field space. For the patients with GA, the maximum reading rate was highly correlated with size of the atrophic area, but not with age or visual acuity within the limited visual acuity range tested. There was a trend to more rapid reading with the scotoma above fixation and slower reading with the scotoma to the left. CONCLUSION: There is a preference for fixation with the scotoma to the right in eyes with GA. Patients with Stargardt disease use different strategies for fixation, perhaps due to subclinical pathology adjacent to the atrophic regions. The size of the atrophic area in GA plays the predominant role in reading rate for eyes that have already lost foveal vision.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Long-term progress in reading abilities in hearing-impaired children trained by the Kanazawa method.

The speech and language training for deaf children at our clinic is done by the Kanazawa method, consisting of reception and production training in sign language (SL) along with auditory/oral language (OL), and written language (WL) training. The present investigation was undertaken to explore long-term progress in reading comprehension abilities in 14 hearing-impaired children who were trained by the Kanazawa method before entering elementary schools. Progress in reading comprehension was evaluated using a standard reading test for hearing peers. The results obtained were as follows: (i) The average score in reading ability just before entering elementary schools was a second level, (ii) this high score was maintained almost longitudinally, and (iii) on the other hand, the hearing-impaired children who had poor reading scores on entering schools continued to score poorly in higher grades. These results suggest that early presentation of WL is effective in the acquisition of reading ability, which is especially difficult for the hearing-impaired.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The UCLA reading and writing program: an evaluation of the beginning stages.

Some individuals with developmental disabilities fail to acquire functional speech despite extensive teaching efforts. To help such individuals develop functional communication skills, a "reading and writing" program was developed. This study was designed to evaluate early parts of the program. Acquisition, transfer, and maintenance of "reading and writing" skills was examined and compared with the acquisition, transfer, and maintenance of sign language. Participants were four children with autism, who scored within the mentally retarded range on standardized tests of intellectual, adaptive, and language functioning, and three 3-year-old non-disabled children. A simultaneous-treatment design was employed to compare the rate of acquisition of "reading and writing" skills to the rate at which the participants acquired receptive and expressive signs. For the participants with autism, acquisition of "reading and writing" was more successful than receptive and expressive signing on all variables assessed. All non-disabled participants acquired all of the "reading and writing" and sign language skills, but participants with autism did not. However, "reading" was acquired slightly quicker by the participants with autism than the non-disabled participants, and the participants with autism also showed some evidence of better transfer and maintenance than the non-disabled participants did.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed2001

Changes in cortical activation during mirror reading before and after training: an fMRI study of procedural learning.

The neural correlates of procedural learning were studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the mirror reading paradigm. The aim of the study was to investigate a presumed learning-related change of activation in cortical areas that are involved in the performance of a nonmotor skill. Changes in cortical blood oxygenation contrast were recorded in 10 healthy subjects while they alternatively read visually presented single mirror script words and normal script words. Responses in naive subjects were compared to those acquired after training of mirror script reading. The acquisition volume included the motor and premotor cortex, the parietal lobe and the occipital lobe including its inferior aspects. Striate and extrastriate visual areas, associative parietal cortex and the premotor cortex were bilaterally active during normal and mirror script reading. Significantly stronger activation during mirror reading was seen in BA7 and 40 (parietal associative cortex) and in BA6 (corresponding to the frontal eye fields). Simultaneous eye movement recordings indicated that activation in BA6 was related to processing components other than saccade frequency. After training, BA6 and BA7 exhibited a decrease of activation during mirror reading that significantly exceeded nonspecific changes observed in the normal script control condition. The present findings confirm the hypothesis of practice-related decrease of activation in task-related cortical areas during nonmotor procedural learning.

Adult↗