Understanding how pre-literate children's language abilities and neural function relate to future reading ability is important for identifying children who may be at-risk for reading problems. Pre-literate children are already proficient users of spoken language and their developing brain networks for language become highly overlapping with brain…

Children with autism spectrum disorders have been reported to be less influenced by a speaker's face during speech perception than those with typically development. To more closely examine these reported differences, a novel visual phonemic restoration paradigm was used to assess neural signatures (event-related potentials [ERPs]) of audiovisual…

The etiological mechanisms of the genetic underpinnings of developmental language disorder (DLD) are unknown, in part due to the behavioral heterogeneity of the disorder's manifestations. In this study, we explored an association between the SETBP1 gene (18q21.1), revealed in a genome-wide association study of DLD in a geographically isolated…

The overarching goal of the new Florida State University/Haskins Laboratory/University of Connecticut Learning Disability (LD) Hub project is to align computational and behavioral theories of individual word reading development more closely with the challenges of learning to read a quasi-regular orthography (i.e., English) for both typically…

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the…

Purpose: To examine neural response to spoken and printed language in children with speech sound errors (SSE). Method: Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to compare processing of auditorily and visually presented words and pseudowords in 17 children with SSE, ages 8;6[years;months] through 10;10, with 17 matched controls. Results: When…

For accurate reading comprehension, readers must first learn to map letters to their corresponding speech sounds and meaning, and then they must string the meanings of many words together to form a representation of the text. Furthermore, readers must master the complexities involved in parsing the relevant syntactic and pragmatic information…

We employed brain-behavior analyses to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing (all predictors of reading (dis)ability) and brain organization for print and speech in beginning readers. For print-related activation, we observed a shared set of…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated multimodal (visual and auditory) semantic and unimodal (visual only) phonological processing in reading disabled (RD) adolescents and non-impaired (NI) control participants. We found reduced activation for RD relative to NI in a number of left-hemisphere reading-related areas across all…

Early language development sets the stage for a lifetime of competence in language and literacy. However, the neural mechanisms associated with the relative advantages of early communication success, or the disadvantages of having delayed language development, are not well explored. In this study, 174 elementary school-age children whose parents…