scholarly journals Neural and functional correlates of impaired reading ability in schizophrenia

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Clément Dondé ◽  
Antigona Martinez ◽  
Pejman Sehatpour ◽  
Gaurav H. Patel ◽  
Rebecca Kraut ◽  
...  

Abstract Deficits in early auditory processing (EAP) are a core component of schizophrenia (SZ) and contribute significantly to impaired overall function. Here, we evaluate the potential contributions of EAP-related impairments in reading to functional capacity and outcome, relative to effects of auditory social cognitive and general neurocognitive dysfunction. Participants included 30-SZ and 28-controls of similar age, sex, and educational achievement. EAP was assessed using an auditory working memory (tone-matching) task. Phonological processing and reading Fluency were assessed using the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing and Woodcock-Johnson reading batteries, respectively. Auditory-related social cognition was assessed using measures of emotion/sarcasm recognition. Functional capacity and outcome were assessed using the UCSD Performance-based Skills Assessment and Specific Level of Functioning scale, respectively. fMRI resting-state functional-connectivity (rsFC) was used to evaluate potential underlying substrates. As predicted, SZ patients showed significant and interrelated deficits in both phonological processing (d = 0.74, p = 0.009) and reading fluency (d = 1.24, p < 0.00005). By contrast, single word reading (d = 0.35, p = 0.31) was intact. In SZ, deficits in EAP and phonological reading ability significantly predicted reduced functional capacity, but not functional outcome. By contrast, deficits in reading fluency significantly predicted impairments in both functional capacity and functional outcome. Moreover, deficits in reading fluency correlated with rsFC alterations among auditory thalamus, early auditory and auditory association regions. These findings indicate significant contributions of EAP deficits and functional connectivity changes in subcortical and early auditory regions to reductions in reading fluency, and of impaired reading ability to impaired functional outcome in SZ.

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Aguilera-Jiménez ◽  
Carmen Delgado ◽  
Alfonso Luque ◽  
Francisco J. Moreno-Pérez ◽  
Isabel. R. Rodríguez-Ortiz ◽  
...  

AbstractThe aims of this study are to assess L1 and L2 variables that influence the reading acquisition of students of Moroccan origin in the South of Spain and compare their reading ability with native Spanish-speaking children. Participants were 38 students of Moroccan origin and 37 native Spanish-speaking students from the same classes. We used an oral vocabulary test and a reading comprehension test, which taps lexical, semantic, and syntactic reading processes, and reading fluency. The results indicated that immigrant students differed from native Spanish-speaking students in word reading, reading fluency, and the use of punctuation marks, but there were no significant differences in reading comprehension. In native Spanish-speaking students, reading comprehension correlated significantly with oral vocabulary and the other reading processes, but in the students of Moroccan origin, only receptive oral vocabulary in L2 correlated with the use of punctuation marks. Being in schools with educational resources specifically aimed at helping the Moroccan pupils was associated with a higher level of word reading in immigrant students.


2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline B. Low ◽  
Linda S. Siegel

The present study examined the relative role played by three cognitive processes — phonological processing, verbal working memory, syntactic awareness — in understanding the reading comprehension performance among 884 native English (L1) speakers and 284 English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) speakers in sixth-grade (mean age: 11.43 years). The performance of both groups of speakers were comparable on measures of word reading, word reading fluency, phonological awareness, phonological decoding fluency and verbal working memory. However, the ESL speakers lagged behind L1 speakers in terms of syntactic awareness. This study also emphasizes the importance of the three cognitive processes in establishing a common model of reading comprehension across English L1 and ESL reading.


2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAZUVIRE VEII ◽  
JOHN EVERATT

Predictions derived from the central processing and script dependent hypotheses were assessed by measuring the reading ability of 116 Grade 2–5 Herero–English bilingual children in Namibia ranging in age from 7 to 12 and investigating possible predictors of word reading among measures of cognitive/linguistic processes. Tasks included measures of word reading, decoding, phonological awareness, verbal and spatial memory, rapid naming, semantic fluency, sound discrimination, listening comprehension and non-verbal reasoning. Faster rates of improvement in literacy within the more transparent language (Herero) supported the predictions of the script dependent hypothesis. However, the central processing hypothesis was also supported by evidence indicating that common underlying cognitive-linguistic processing skills predicted literacy levels across the two languages. The results argue for the importance of phonological processing skills for the development of literacy skills across languages/scripts and show that phonological skills in the L2 can be reliable predictors of literacy in the L1.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Åsberg Johnels ◽  
Carmela Miniscalco

This case study seeks to extend our knowledge of the phenotype associated with excellent word reading in autism spectrum disorder by a detailed examination of psycholinguistic, neuropsychological/cognitive, and classroom/academic functioning of a Swedish-speaking 7-year-old boy (called “Jonas”). On age-referenced word reading-decoding assessment, Jonas scored among the top 7%. Reading comprehension status varied as a function of information source. Jonas’s phonological processing and phonological memory performance was found to be normal to strong. In contrast, he scored poorly on tests of oral semantic, syntactical, and narrative language. On the WISC-III, Jonas performed highly uneven across subtests from impaired to above average levels. On the Kaufman factors, Jonas had a peak in perceptual organization (IQ score 119), thus reflecting very strong visual attention skills, which together with normal to strong phonological abilities might underlie his excellent word reading. Finally, both his parents and teacher reported on other classroom-learning skills and difficulties.


2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADÈLE LAFRANCE ◽  
ALEXANDRA GOTTARDO

French/English bilingual children (N=40) in French language schools participated in an 8-month longitudinal study of the relation between phonological processing skills and reading in French and English. Participants were administered measures of phonological awareness, working memory, naming speed, and reading in both languages. The results of the concurrent analyses show that phonological awareness skills in both French and English were uniquely predictive of reading performance in both languages after accounting for the influences of cognitive ability, reading ability, working memory, and naming speed. These findings support the hypothesis that phonological awareness is strongly related to beginning word reading skill in an alphabetic orthography. The results of the longitudinal analyses also suggest that orthographic depth influences phonological factors related to reading.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (S1) ◽  
pp. s244-s244
Author(s):  
M. Chieffi ◽  
A. Mucci ◽  
A. Rossi ◽  
P. Rocca ◽  
A. Bertolino ◽  
...  

IntroductionNeurocognition may represent an indicator of genetic risk and poor outcome in schizophrenia patients (SCZ) predicting real life functioning.ObjectivesAs cognitive performance of unaffected first-degree relatives (UR) is intermediate between SCZ and healthy controls (HC), neurocognitive impairment may represent a marker of vulnerability to schizophrenia.AimsTo investigate social and neurocognition in all subjects and their impact on functional capacity of patients as markers of vulnerability.MethodsSample: 922 SCZ, 379 UR and 780 HC. Assessment: MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (neurocognition), Facial Emotion Identification Test and Awareness of Social Inference Test (social cognition) and Specific Level of Functioning Scale (social functioning). Analyses: Structural Equation Model (SEM) analyses to model the impact of all variables on functional outcome.ResultsSCZ scored worse in all domains than UR and HC. UR had significant impairments in all cognitive domains with respect to HC. Cognitive functioning had direct and indirect impacts on functional outcome mainly through social cognition and functional capacity. Social cognition had a direct impact on outcome, independent of neurocognition.ConclusionSCZ and UR display similar patterns of social and neurocognition deficits. Our results confirm a strong impact of neurocogniton on functional outcome. Social cognition has become an interesting object of study and its conceptualization as trait variable and the existence of a continuum between SCZ and UR are hypotheses for further research.AcknowledgementsThe study was carried out within the project “Multicenter study on factors influencing real-life social functioning of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia” of the Italian Network for Research on Psychoses.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 686-699
Author(s):  
Yu Gyeong Choe ◽  
Seunghee Ha

Objectives: This study aimed to examine the phonological processing and reading abilities of elementary school-aged children with and without cleft palate (CP).Methods: The participants were 10 children with CP and 12 typically developing children in the first to the second grades of elementary school. All children with CP in the study were identified with speech and language development problems during preschool age and were recommended speech and language therapy. The performances of phonological processing were measured in terms of phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme awareness), phonological memory (nonword repetition, digit span and backward digit span), and rapid automatized naming. The reading abilities were also measured in terms of decoding, reading fluency and reading comprehension. The correlations among vocabulary, articulation, and phonological processing and reading ability were examined.Results: Children with CP showed significantly lower performances in phonological awareness of syllable level and nonword repetition than typically developing children. Also, significant group differences were seen in all decoding and reading comprehension tasks except reading fluency. The results showed that nonword repetition performances of children with CP were highly correlated with receptive vocabulary and percentage of consonants correct.Conclusion: This study confirmed that school-aged children with CP who showed speech sound disorders in preschool age are likely to have difficulties in phonological processing and reading. Therefore, this study suggested that comprehensive evaluation of phonological processing skills should be performed more actively in preschool children with CP who show speech sound disorders, and intervention should continue to improve reading skills for school age.


2015 ◽  
pp. 109-118

Purpose: Children with reading disability frequently exhibit reduced sensitivity to motion, as assessed by coherent motion thresholds (CMT) and critical flicker frequency (CFF). A retrospective analysis was conducted to evaluate whether there was a correlation between reading fluency as measured by the Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency (TOSWRF), reading rate (as measured with the Visagraph II Eye Movement System), and pseudoword decoding (as measured with the pseudoword decoding subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Achievement Test, WIAT-II), and these two visual motion sensitivity tests. Methods: 68 children between the ages of 7-16 years presented to the principal investigator’s optometric practice for a vision therapy evaluation between June 1st 2010 and March 31st 2011. As part of the standard protocol for vision therapy evaluations, they were assessed using the CMT, CFF, TOSWRF, WIAT-II (pseudoword decoding subtest), and Visagraph II. The patients were divided into reading ability groups based on the published recommendations from the TOSWRF manual. Individuals at the 25% or below level were labeled as poor fluency, individuals in the 26th to 74th% level were labeled average fluency, and those in the 75% or higher level were labeled as good fluency. Results: Pearson correlations were computed between the dependent variables revealing several important relationships: Fluency (TOSWRF) correlated significantly with all of the dependent measures selected for study. Of these measures, the WIAT-II subtest score correlated the most strongly at a moderate level (r = +0.569). Reading rate (Visagraph II) was the next strongest correlate of fluency, with changes in rate accounting for 26.5% of the variance in fluency. The variables of CMT and CFF were combined with rate in two follow-up, logistic regressions to determine whether their inclusion added to the classification accuracy of rate. Both variables improved the specificity of rate, which has a high likelihood of false positives. CMT maintained the sensitivity of rate while boosting specificity, whereas CFF caused a decline in the sensitivity of rate while greatly improving specificity. Reading rate with CFF and with CMT both had an overall accurate prediction of fluency of 84%. Conclusions: Silent word reading fluency correlated with CMT, CFF, reading rate, and WIAT-2. Combining reading rate with a motion sensitivity test (either CMT or CFF) maintained good sensitivity, while greatly improving specificity. Clinicians should consider adding a motion sensitivity test to the Visagraph II reading rate assessment when evaluating school-age children who may be at risk for reading fluency deficits.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (6) ◽  
pp. 552-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastián Aravena ◽  
Jurgen Tijms ◽  
Patrick Snellings ◽  
Maurits W. van der Molen

In this study, we examined the learning of letter–speech sound correspondences within an artificial script and performed an experimental analysis of letter–speech sound learning among dyslexic and normal readers vis-à-vis phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, reading, and spelling. Participants were provided with 20 min of training aimed at learning eight new basic letter–speech sound correspondences, followed by a short assessment of mastery of the correspondences and word-reading ability in this unfamiliar script. Our results demonstrated that brief training is moderately successful in differentiating dyslexic readers from normal readers in their ability to learn letter–speech sound correspondences. The normal readers outperformed the dyslexic readers for accuracy and speed on a letter–speech sound matching task, as well as on a word-reading task containing familiar words written in the artificial orthography. Importantly, the new artificial script-related measures were related to phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming and made a unique contribution in predicting individual differences in reading and spelling ability. Our results are consistent with the view that a fundamental letter–speech sound learning deficit is a key factor in dyslexia.


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