The Development of Visual Word Recognition

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We’ve looked at brain regions and development during word related tasks (word generation, reading and repeating), but we haven’t yet looked at a straight up study of word recognition and development.



What’s the best task to use to study visual word recognition? You can have people read out loud, but that involves processes like speech generation. Likewise, reading sentences or paragraphs requires the reader to process meaning and grammar in addition to the words on the page.

One segment of the field has gravitated towards tasks of single word processing that don’t require reading at all. In this particular study, Turkeltaub and colleagues use a tall letter detection task. The subjects press a button if the word has a tall letter (like d or l). As a control condition, subjects perform the same task on false fonts. Even though you can do this task without reading the words, the assumption is that reading, being highly automatic, will occur anyways. This approach, focusing on the automatic, bottom up process, allows for a more tightly controlled study. However, it also limits the findings to that very thin slice of the reading process.

Turkeltaub and colleagues tested forty one subjects ranging from 8 to 20 years old. In the whole group, the words > symbols contrast gives activation in the left posterior temporal, left inferior frontal, and right inferior parietal regions.

The authors also looked at correlations between activation and reading ability. The trend here seems to be increasing lateralization (more reliance on left hemisphere regions and less reliance on right hemisphere regions), with reading skill.*   Interesting.  I wonder how this relates to lateralization of spoken language.

Finally, the authors looked for regions that correlated with other behavioral measures, including phonetic working memory (left intraparietal sulcus and left and right middle frontal gyri), phonological awareness (left hemisphere network, incluing posterior STS and ventral inferior frontal), and phonological naming (bilateral network, including right posterior superior temporal, right middle tempral, and left ventral inferior frontal.) Surprisingly (to me at least) there is almost no overlap between the regions for the three measures. This could either mean that these measures involve very different cognitive and neural processes, or that the automatic task used in this experiment was not suited for accurately tapping into these abilities.

*Reading ability correlated positively with activation left hemisphere frontal and temporal cortical areas, and negatively with right hemisphere posterior regions. There was no correlation in the left fusiform (visual word form area), but there is a negative correlation in right posterior fusiform. 

Turkeltaub, P., Gareau, L., Flowers, D., Zeffiro, T., & Eden, G. (2003). Development of neural mechanisms for reading Nature Neuroscience, 6 (7), 767-773 DOI: 10.1038/nn1065