Skip to content
Frontiers
Search

Neuroscience

Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience ·

Volume 4 - 2012 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnevo.2012.00008

Learning to read aligns visual analytical skills with grapheme-phoneme mapping: evidence from illiterates

  • Thomas Lachmann1*corresponding author
  • Gunjan Khera1
  • Narayanan Srinivasan2
  • Cees van Leeuwen3
  1. 11 Center for Cognitive Science, Cognitive and Developmental Psychology Unit, University of Kaiserslautern Kaiserslautern, Germany
  2. 22 Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Allahabad Allahabad, India
  3. 33 KU Leuven, Experimental Psychology Research Unit, Laboratory for Perceptual Dynamics Leuven, Belgium
Article metrics0 viewsView details
PDFCiteMetrics

Abstract

Learning to read puts evolutionary established speech and visual object recognition functions to novel use. As we previously showed, this leads to particular rearrangements and differentiations in these functions, for instance the habitual preference for holistic perceptual organization in visual object recognition and its suppression in perceiving letters. We performed the experiment in which the differentiation between holistic non-letter processing and analytic letter processing in literates was originally shown (van Leeuwen and Lachmann, 2004 ) with illiterate adults. The original differentiation is absent in illiterates; they uniformly showed analytic perception for both letters and non-letters. The result implies that analytic visual perception is not a secondary development resulting from learning to read but, rather, a primary mode of perceptual organization on a par with holistic perception.

Keywords

References

  1. Banai K., Ahissar M. (2006). Auditory processing deficits in dyslexia: task or stimulus related? Cereb. Cortex 16, 1718 – 1728. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj107
  2. Bavelier D., Deruelle C., Proksch J. (2000). Positive and negative compatibility effects. Percept. Psychophys. 62, 100 – 112.
  3. Blomert L. (2011). The neural signature of orthographic–phonological binding in successful and failing reading development. Neuroimage 57, 695 – 703. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.11.003
  4. Boenke L., Ohl F., Nikolaev A., Lachmann T., van Leeuwen C. (2009). Different time courses of Stroop and Garner effects in perception – an event-related potentials study. Neuroimage 45, 1272 – 1288. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.01.019
  5. Briand K. A. (1994). Selective attention to global or local-structure of objects – alternative measures of nontarget processing. Percept. Psychophys. 55, 562 – 575.
  6. Bruder J., Leppanen P. H. T., Bartling J., Csepe V., Demonet J. F., Schulte-Koerne G. (2010). An investigation of prototypical and atypical within-category vowels and non-speech analogues on cortical auditory evoked related potentials (AERPs) in 9 year old children. Int. J. Psychophysiol. 79, 106 – 117. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2010.09.008
  7. Burgund E. D., Guo Y., Aurbach E. L. (2009). Priming for letters and pseudoletters in mid-fusiform cortex: examining letter selectivity and case invariance. Exp. Brain Res. 193, 591 – 601. doi:10.1007/s00221-008-1661-9
  8. Burgund E. D., Schlaggar B. L., Petersen S. E. (2006). Development of letter-specific processing: the effect of reading ability. Acta Psychol. 122, 99 – 108. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2005.11.005
  9. Cantlon J. F., Pinel P., Dehaene S., Pelphrey K. A. (2011). Cortical representations of symbols, objects, and faces are pruned back during early childhood. Cereb. Cortex 21, 191 – 199. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhq078
  10. Ceponiene R., Shestakova A., Balian P., Alku P., Yiaguchi K., Näätänen R. (2001). Childrens auditory event-related potentials index sound complexity and speechness. Int. J. Neurosci. 109, 245 – 260.
  11. Cheour M., Leppänen P. H. T., Kraus N. (2000). Mismatch negativity (MMN) as a tool for investigating auditory discrimination and sensory memory in infants and children. Clin. Neurophysiol. 111, 4 – 16.
  12. Courchesne E. (1978). Neurophysiological correlates of cognitive development: changes in long-latency event-related potentials from childhood to adulthood. Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol. 45, 468 – 482.
  13. Dehaene S., Cohen L. (2007). Cultural recycling of cortical maps. Neuron 56, 384 – 398. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2007.10.004
  14. Dehaene S., Nakamura K., Jobert A., Kuroki C., Ogawa S., Cohen L. (2010a). Why do children make mirror errors in reading? Neural correlates of mirror invariance in the visual word form area. Neuroimage 49, 1837 – 1848. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.09.024
  15. Dehaene S., Pegado F., Braga L. W., Ventura P., Nunes G., Jobert A., Dehaene Lambertz G., Kolinsky R., Morais J., Cohen L. (2010b). How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language. Science 330, 1359 – 1364. doi:10.1126/science.1194140
  16. Eriksen C. W., Schultz D. W. (1979). Information processing in visual search: a continuous flow conception and experimental results. Percept. Psychophys. 25, 249 – 263.
  17. Freeman E. D., Driver J., Sagi D., Zhaoping L. (2003). Top-down modulation of lateral interactions in early vision: does attention affect integration of the whole or just perception of the parts? Curr. Biol. 11, 985 – 989. doi:10.1016/S0960-9822(03)00333-6
  18. Frith U. (1985). “Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia,” in Surface Dyslexia; Neuropsychological and Cognitive Studies of Phonological Reading, eds Patterson K., Marshall J., Coltheart M. (London, UK: Erlbaum), 301 – 330.
  19. Grainger J., Tydgat I., Issele J. (2010). Crowding affects letters and symbols differently. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 36, 673 – 688. doi:10.1037/a0016888
  20. Jincho N., Lachmann T., van Leeuwen C. (2008). Dissociating congruence effects in letters versus shapes: Kanji and kana. Acta Psychol. 129, 138 – 146. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.05.006
  21. Kolinsky R., Verhaeghe A., Fernandes T., Mengarda E. J., Grimm-Cabral L., Morais J. (2011). J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 140, 210 – 238. doi:10.1037/a0022168
  22. Lachmann T. (2002). “Reading disability as a deficit in functional coordination and information integration,” in Basic Functions of Language, Reading and Reading Disability, eds Witruk E., Friederici A. D., Lachmann T. (Boston, MA: Kluwer), 165 – 198.
  23. Lachmann T., van Leeuwen C. (2004). Negative congruence effects in letter and pseudo-letter recognition: the role of similarity and response conflict. Cogn. Process. 5, 239 – 248.
  24. Lachmann T., van Leeuwen C. (2007). Paradoxical enhancement of letter recognition in developmental dyslexia. Dev. Neuropsychol. 31, 61 – 77. doi:10.1080/87565640709336887
  25. Lachmann T., van Leeuwen C. (2008a). Different letter-processing strategies in diagnostic subgroups of developmental dyslexia. Cogn. Neuropsychol. 25, 730 – 744. doi:10.1080/02643290802309514
  26. Lachmann T., van Leeuwen C. (2008b). Differentiation of holistic processing in the time course of letter recognition. Acta Psychol. 129, 121 – 129. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.05.003
  27. Lachmann T., Schumacher B., van Leeuwen C. (2009). Controlled but independent: effects of mental rotation and developmental dyslexia in dual task settings. Perception 38, 1019 – 1034.
  28. Lachmann T., Steinbrink C., Schumacher B., van Leeuwen C. (2010). Different letter-processing strategies in diagnostic subgroups of developmental dyslexia occur also in a transparent orthography: reply to a commentary by Spinelli et al. Cogn. Neuropsychol. 26, 759 – 768. doi:10.1080/02643291003737065
  29. Martin-Rhee M. M., Bialystok E. (2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Biling.-Lang. Cogn. 11, 81 – 93.
  30. Miles J. D., Proctor R. W. (2010). Attention is required for acquisition but not expression of new response biases. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 36, 1554 – 1560. doi:10.1037/a0020603
  31. Neubauer A., Fink A. (2011). Intelligence and neural efficiency: measures of brain activation versus measures of functional connectivity in the brain. Intelligence 37, 223 – 229.
  32. Parviainen T., Helenius P., Poskiparta E., Niemi P., Salmelin R. (2006). Cortical sequence of word perception in beginning readers. J. Neurosci. 26, 6052 – 6061. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0673-06.2006
  33. Parviainen T., Helenius P., Poskiparta E., Niemi P., Salmelin R. (2011). Speech perception in the child brain: cortical timing and its relevance to literacy acquisition. Hum. Brain Mapp. 32, 2193 – 2206. doi:10.1002/hbm.21181
  34. Pegado F., Nakamura K., Cohen L., Dehaene S. (2011). Breaking the symmetry: mirror discrimination for single letters but not for pictures in the Visual Word Form Area. Neuroimage 55, 742 – 774. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.11.043
  35. Perea M., Moret-Tatay C., Panadero V. (2011). Suppression of mirror generalization for reversible letters: evidence from masked priming. J. Mem. Lang. 65, 237 – 246.
  36. Pomerantz J. R., Pristach E. A. (1989). Emergent features, attention, and perceptual glue in visual form perception. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 15, 635 – 649.
  37. Pomerantz J. R., Pristach E. A., Carson C. E. (1989). “Attention and object perception” in Object Perception: Structure and Process, eds Shepp B., Ballesteros S. (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), 53 – 89.
  38. Reicher G. M. (1969). Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material. J. Exp. Psychol. 81, 275 – 280.
  39. Schwarzer G. (2002). Processing of facial and non-facial visual stimuli in 2-5-year-old children. Infant Child Dev. 11, 253 – 269.
  40. Schwarzer G., Kretzer M., Wimmer D., Jovanovic B. (2010). Holistic face processing among school children, younger and older adults. Eur. J. Dev. Psychol. 7, 511 – 528.
  41. Serniclaes W., Ventura P., Morais J., Kolinsky R. (2005). Categorical perception of speech sounds in illiterate adults. Cognition 98, 35 – 44. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.03.002
  42. Shafer V. L., Morr M. L., Kreuzer J. A., Kurtzberg D. (2000). Maturation of mismatch negativity in school-age children. Ear Hear. 21, 242 – 251.
  43. Tun P. A., Lachman M. E. (2008). Age differences in reaction time and attention in a national telephone sample of adults: education, sex, and task complexity matter. Dev. Psychol. 44, 1421 – 1429. doi:10.1037/a0012845
  44. van der Helm P. A., Leeuwenberg E. L. J. (1996). Goodness of visual regularities: a nontransformational approach. Psychol. Rev. 103, 429 – 456.
  45. van Leeuwen C., Bakker L. (1995). Stroop can occur without Garner interference: strategic and mandatory influences in multidimensional stimuli. Percept. Psychophys. 57, 379 – 392.
  46. van Leeuwen C., Lachmann T. (2004). Negative and positive congruence effects in letters and shapes. Percept. Psychophys. 6, 908 – 925.
  47. Ventura P., Pattamadilok C., Fernandes T., Klein O., Morais J., Kolinsky R. (2008). Schooling in western culture promotes context-free processing. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 100, 79 – 88. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2008.02.001
  48. Wagemans J. (1993). Skewed symmetry: a nonaccidental property used to perceive visual forms. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 19, 364 – 380.
  49. Wagemans J. (1999). Toward a better approach to goodness: comments on van der Helm and Leeuwenberg (1996). Psychol. Rev. 106, 610 – 621.
  50. Wetzel N., Widmann A., Schröger E. (2011). Processing of novel identifiablility and duration in children and adults. Biol. Sci. 86, 39 – 49. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.10.005

Citation

Lachmann, T., et al. (2012). Learning to read aligns visual analytical skills with grapheme-phoneme mapping: evidence from illiterates. Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, Volume 4. https://doi.org/
Received
Accepted
Published
Volume
4 - 2012

Copyright

Copyright © 2012 Lachmann, Khera, Srinivasan and van Leeuwen.

License: http://www.frontiersin.org/licenseagreement

*Correspondence: Thomas Lachmann

Article metrics

Views
0
Downloads
0
Citations
0
Shares
0

Related articles

NeuroscienceNeurobiology of human language and its evolution: primate and non-primate perspectivesConstance Scharff, Angela D. Friederici, Michael PetridesNeuroscienceBirdsong: Is It Music to Their Ears?Sarah E. Earp, Donna L. ManeyNeuroscienceLife History Theory and Social PsychologyDonald F. Sacco, Karol Osipowicz