Phonological and semantic influences on auditory word perception in children with and without reading impairments using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG)

Children with dyslexia struggle with learning to read despite adequate intelligence, motivation, and schooling. Over the years, there has been a growing consensus about the role of phonological processing in reading disability. Poor readers typically do worse than their normal reading peers on tasks that require phonological processing which has been linked, directly or indirectly, to their speech perception abilities. The work in this thesis combined behavioral, MEG, and EEG methods to examine how normal and reading-impaired children, 7-13 years of age, perceive speech under varying degrees of phonological contrast (1 vs. 3 phonetic features). In a series of auditory word perception experiments, good and poor readers were found to do worse in accuracy and/or reaction times in phonologically similar (i.e., 1-feature contrast) than phonologically dissimilar (i.e., 2 or 3-feature contrast) conditions. Despite the similar behavioral performance and EEG responses for the two groups, a region of interest (ROI) based MEG approach revealed differences in the brain activation of the two groups in superior temporal regions at 140 to 300 ms.

Department dc:contributor.department

Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Wehner, Daniel T

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Maria Mody.

• Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39575
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39575

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39575