Neural Basis of Reading Flashcards
What are the 2 units of the writing system?
- Alphabetic and Logographic
- Transparency and opaque orthography
Split-brain patients are most likely to have difficulties in reading what?
words presented in the left visual hemifield
What is a lexical decision task?
The task where participants need to decide, as quickly as possible, whether letter string forms a meaningful word (is it a word or non-word?).
Describe the stages of reading.
- detection of visual features
- letter recognition (90ms)
- Visual word recognition (110ms)
- Semantic reasoning (>160ms)
What is Principle Component Analysis (PCA)?
○ Reduce variables in data set (seen below)
○ Lowest level variable (word length) to highest level variable (semantic coherence).
○ Use individual variables and correlate the amplitude in ERPs and the principle component values.
- The stronger the word variable and a larger EPR shows that they are related.
What did Hauk et al (2006) Lexical Decision task find?
- Reaction time and accuracy is better for words than non-words.
- Visual processing time is not strongly affected by length of words.
- Still recognise the word as it is even when some of the letters are covered
- There is top-down contributions of our knowledge of the word
What is the word superiority effect?
There is top-down contributions of our knowledge of the word.
What causes word blindness?
- Damage to the left ventral occipital temporal areas (VWFA) due to stroke can develop word blindness.
- Patients with damage to neighbouring areas have not developed visual blindness.
describe the brain activation when people are presented with words and non words in the 2 visual fields.
Cohen et al (2002)
- Compared response form words and non-words against the response from the checkerboard stimulus.
○ They found that the left side of the visual word-form area was activated when stimulus was presented on either side of the visual field.
what did Cohen et al (2002) conclude from their split brain study on the visual word form area?
- visual word form area is on the left
- words are presented on the right = VWFA activation
- words presented on the left = no activation in split brain patients of the VWFA.
- This gives evidence for VWFA being on the left.
Is the VWFA specific to words?
- Left ventral occipital-temporal area (VWFA) are not word specific, however it does have heightened sensitivity to visual word forms.
- All sorts of visual features are being analyses here.
What is peripheral dyslexia?
A type of acquired dyslexia which is marked by troubles in processing the visual factors of terms and, not like central dyslexia, stems from injury to the visual analysis system.
What is attentional dyslexia?
Difficulty in separating constituent letters/words
Letter migration errors:
WIN FED → FIN FED (say)
What is neglect dyslexia?
Letter substitution errors on one side (contralateral lesion)
CLOCK →BLOCK
CLOCK →CLOAK
What are the types of peripheral dyslexia?
Attentional dyslexia
Neglect dyslexia
Pure Alexia