Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T13:53:47.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A role for putamen in phonological processing in children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2016

SARIKA CHERODATH ,
CHAITRA RAO ,
RASHI MIDHA ,
SUMATHI T A  and
NANDINI C SINGH
SARIKA CHERODATH
Affiliation:
National Brain Research Centre, India
CHAITRA RAO
Affiliation:
National Brain Research Centre, India
RASHI MIDHA
Affiliation:
National Brain Research Centre, India
SUMATHI T A
Affiliation:
National Brain Research Centre, India
NANDINI C SINGH*
Affiliation:
National Brain Research Centre, India
*
Address for correspondence: Nandini C Singh, National Brain Research Centre, Manesar, India – 122051[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Bilingual children are required to successfully develop phonological skills in two languages, yet little is known about the neural correlates associated with them. We obtained structural imaging data from 30 Hindi–English children aged between 8 and 10 years and used voxel based morphometry to explore neuroanatomical correlates of behavioural measures of phonological awareness. Our results showed that phonological skills in English are predicted by grey matter volume of bilateral putamen, but solely by right putamen in Hindi. Post-hoc analysis revealed that English nonword reading correlates with grey matter volume in bilateral putamen while in Hindi nonword reading it correlates only with right putamen. These differences in putamen-based mechanisms indicate that syllable level awareness sufficiently supports early literacy in the transparent, alphasyllabic Hindi orthography whereas that in English requires both phonemic and syllabic level awareness. Our findings point towards a key role for putamen in mediating phonological and reading skills in children.

Keywords

Bilingualismphonological awarenessvoxel-based morphometryreading
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Special Issue 2: Cross-linguistic Priming in Bilinguals: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Language Processing, Acquisition and Change , March 2017 , pp. 318 - 326
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This work was supported by Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, and National Brain Research Centre. We would like to thank Mr. Jitender Ahlawat for assistance in MRI data acquisition and Dr. Megha Sharda and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

References

Abutalebi, J., Cappa, S. F., & Perani, D. (2001). The bilingual brain as revealed by functional neuroimaging. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 4 (02), 179–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abutalebi, J., Rosa, P. A. D., Castro Gonzaga, A. K., Keim, R., Costa, A., & Perani, D. (2013). The role of the left putamen in multilingual language production. Brain and language, 125 (3), 307–315.Google Scholar
Berens, M. S., Kovelman, I., & Petitto, L.-A. (2013). Should bilingual children learn reading in two languages at the same time or in sequence? Bilingual research journal, 36 (1), 35–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caravolas, M., & Bruck, M. (1993). The Effect of Oral and Written Language Input on Children′ s Phonological Awareness: A Cross-Linguistic Study. Journal of experimental child psychology, 55 (1), 1–30.Google Scholar
Castro-Caldas, A., Petersson, K. M., Reis, A., Stone-Elander, S., & Ingvar, M. (1998). The illiterate brain. Learning to read and write during childhood influences the functional organization of the adult brain. Brain, 121 (6), 1053–1063.Google ScholarPubMed
Chuang, H.-K., Joshi, R. M., & Dixon, L. Q. (2011). Cross-Language Transfer of Reading Ability: Evidence From Taiwanese Ninth Grade Adolescents. Journal of Literacy Research, 1086296X11431157.Google Scholar
Cummins, J. (1979). Linguistic interdependence and the educational development of bilingual children. Review of educational research, 49 (2), 222–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
David, C. (1997). English as a global language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dixon, L. Q., Chuang, H.-K., & Quiroz, B. (2012). English phonological awareness in bilinguals: a cross-linguistic study of Tamil, Malay and Chinese English-language learners. Journal of Research in Reading, 35 (4), 372–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durgunoğlu, A. Y. (2002). Cross-linguistic transfer in literacy development and implications for language learners. Annals of Dyslexia, 52 (1), 189–204.Google Scholar
Durgunoğlu, A. Y., Nagy, W. E., & Hancin-Bhatt, B. J. (1993). Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness. Journal of educational psychology, 85 (3), 453.Google Scholar
Frederickson, N., Frith, U., & Reason, R. (1997). Phonological Assessment Battery (manual and test materials).Google Scholar
Friston, K. J., Frith, C., Liddle, P., & Frackowiak, R. (1991). Comparing functional (PET) images: the assessment of significant change. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, 11 (4), 690–699.Google Scholar
Geva, E., & Wang, M. (2001). The development of basic reading skills in children: A cross-language perspective. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 21, 182–204.Google Scholar
Giraud, A.-L., & Poeppel, D. (2012). Cortical oscillations and speech processing: emerging computational principles and operations. Nature neuroscience, 15 (4), 511–517.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goswami, U. (2001). Early phonological development and the acquisition of literacy. Handbook of early literacy research, 1, 111–125.Google Scholar
Gottardo, A., Yan, B., Siegel, L. S., & Wade-Woolley, L. (2001). Factors related to English reading performance in children with Chinese as a first language: More evidence of cross-language transfer of phonological processing. Journal of educational psychology, 93 (3), 530.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harm, M. W., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1999). Phonology, reading acquisition, and dyslexia: insights from connectionist models. Psychological review, 106 (3), 491.Google Scholar
Hartzell, J. F., Davis, B., Melcher, D., Miceli, G., Jovicich, J., Nath, T., Singh, N. C., & Hasson, U. (2015). Brains of verbal memory specialists show anatomical differences in language, memory and visual systems. NeuroImage.Google Scholar
Hervais-Adelman, A., Moser-Mercer, B., Michel, C. M., & Golestani, N. (2014). fMRI of simultaneous interpretation reveals the neural basis of extreme language control. Cerebral Cortex, bhu158.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Friederici, A. D., Wessels, J. M., Svenkerud, V. Y., & Jusczyk, A. M. (1993). Infants′ Sensitivity to the Sound Patterns of Native Language Words. Journal of Memory and Language, 32 (3), 402–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, D., Milner, B., Zatorre, R. J., Meyer, E., & Evans, A. C. (1995). The neural substrates underlying word generation: a bilingual functional-imaging study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 92 (7), 2899–2903.Google Scholar
Klein, D., Watkins, K. E., Zatorre, R. J., & Milner, B. (2006). Word and nonword repetition in bilingual subjects: a PET study. Human brain mapping, 27 (2), 153–161.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Klein, D., Zatorre, R. J., Milner, B., Meyer, E., & Evans, A. C. (1994). Left putaminal activation when speaking a second language: evidence from PET. Neuroreport, 5 (17), 2295–2297.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Melby-Lervåg, M., & Lervåg, A. (2011). Cross-linguistic transfer of oral language, decoding, phonological awareness and reading comprehension: a meta-analysis of the correlational evidence. Journal of Research in Reading, 34 (1), 114–135.Google Scholar
Morillon, B., Liégeois-Chauvel, C., Arnal, L. H., Bénar, C.-G., & Giraud, A.-L. (2012). Asymmetric function of theta and gamma activity in syllable processing: an intra-cortical study. Frontiers in psychology, 3.Google Scholar
Nag, S. (2007). Early reading in Kannada: The pace of acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic awareness. Journal of Research in Reading, 30 (1), 7–22.Google Scholar
Nag, S., Caravolas, M., & Snowling, M. J. (2011). Beyond alphabetic processes: literacy and its acquisition in the alphasyllabic languages. Reading and Writing, 24 (6), 615–622.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perani, D., & Abutalebi, J. (2005). The neural basis of first and second language processing. Current opinion in neurobiology, 15 (2), 202–206.Google Scholar
Perfetti, C. A. (1992). The representation problem in reading acquisition.Google Scholar
Preston, J. L., Frost, S. J., Mencl, W. E., Fulbright, R. K., Landi, N., Grigorenko, E., Jacobsen, L., & Pugh, K. R. (2010). Early and late talkers: school-age language, literacy and neurolinguistic differences. Brain, 133 (8), 2185–2195.Google Scholar
Price, C. J., Green, D. W., & Von Studnitz, R. (1999). A functional imaging study of translation and language switching. Brain, 122 (12), 2221–2235.Google Scholar
Saiegh-Haddad, E., & Geva, E. (2008). Morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and reading in English–Arabic bilingual children. Reading and Writing, 21 (5), 481–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, M., Geva, E., Share, D. L., & Leikin, M. (2007). Learning to read in English as third language The cross-linguistic transfer of phonological processing skills. Written Language & Literacy, 10 (1), 25–52.Google Scholar
Tettamanti, M., Moro, A., Messa, C., Moresco, R. M., Rizzo, G., Carpinelli, A., Matarrese, M., Fazio, F., & Perani, D. (2005). Basal ganglia and language: phonology modulates dopaminergic release. Neuroreport, 16 (4), 397–401.Google Scholar
Tiwari, S., Nair, R., & Krishnan, G. (2011). A preliminary investigation of akshara knowledge in the Malayalam alphasyllabary: extension of Nag's (2007) study. Writing Systems Research, 3 (2), 145–151.Google Scholar
Tzourio-Mazoyer, N., Landeau, B., Papathanassiou, D., Crivello, F., Etard, O., Delcroix, N., Mazoyer, B., & Joliot, M. (2002). Automated anatomical labeling of activations in SPM using a macroscopic anatomical parcellation of the MNI MRI single-subject brain. Neuroimage, 15 (1), 273–289.Google Scholar
Vaid, J., & Gupta, A. (2002). Exploring word recognition in a semi-alphabetic script: The case of Devanagari. Brain and Language, 81 (1), 679–690.Google Scholar
Vasanta, D. (2004). Processing phonological information in a semi-syllabic script: Developmental data from Telugu. Reading and Writing, 17 (1-2), 59–78.Google Scholar
Vigneau, M., Beaucousin, V., Hervé, P.-Y., Jobard, G., Petit, L., Crivello, F., Mellet, E., Zago, L., Mazoyer, B., & Tzourio-Mazoyer, N. (2011). What is right-hemisphere contribution to phonological, lexico-semantic, and sentence processing?: Insights from a meta-analysis. Neuroimage, 54 (1), 577–593.Google Scholar
Wagner, R. K., & Torgesen, J. K. (1987). The nature of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills. Psychological Bulletin, 101 (2), 192.Google Scholar
Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., Rashotte, C. A., Hecht, S. A., Barker, T. A., Burgess, S. R., Donahue, J., & Garon, T. (1997). Changing relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading as children develop from beginning to skilled readers: a 5-year longitudinal study. Developmental psychology, 33 (3), 468.Google Scholar
Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological bulletin, 131 (1), 3.Google Scholar