Literacy Specialist Who Works in Adult Education.

¶ … literacy specialist who works in Adult Education. You have noticed that reading is very difficult for people to learn in adulthood, and you wonder whether this might be related to brain plasticity.

Gaillard, WH et al. (2002) Language dominance in partial epilepsy patients identified with an fMRI reading task, Neurology, 59, 2, 256-265

Search words:reading + fMRI; Google Scholar; neuroscience.

Poldrack, RA, Desmond, JE., Glover, GH & Gabrieli, JD. (1998) . The neural basis of visual skill learning: an fMRI study of mirror reading. Cereb. Cortex, 8, 1-10.

Search words:reading + fMRI; Google Scholar; neuroscience.

Guinevere F.E. et al. (2004) Neural Changes following Remediation in Adult Developmental Dyslexia, Neuron, 44, 3, 411-422

Search words: reading + fmri + adults + neuroplasticity; Google Scholar; neuroscience.

Brain imaging studies have investigated the neural mechanisms of recovery in adults following acquired disorders and childhood developmental disorders. However, there are few to no studies that investigate the neural systems that underlie adult rehabilitation of neural-ingrained learning disorder (i.e. those from birth) despite their high incidence. In this study, researchers identified the differences in brain activity during a phonological manipulation task before and after a behavioral intervention in adults who had developmental dyslexia. Phonologically targeted training resulted in improvements in reading in the instructed participants as compared to the dyslexics who received no instruction, and fMRI showed concordant increases in activation in the bilateral parietal and right perisylvian cortices. Authors concluded that behavioral plasticity in adult developmental dyslexia involves two neural mechanisms (or regions in the brain)

24 participants were used. A sublecxical sound deletion task was employed where researchers tested for phonological processing. They tested 19 dyslexic patients who did not receive reading instruction with 19 dyslexic patients who had received instruction (112 hours of structured multi-sensory phonological intervention) and using FMRI identified regions of the brain that were activated during the study. . .

Adults who received instruction benefited significantly in their phonological processing skills as compared to those who had not received instruction. This improved understanding of the phonological characteristics of language led, in turn, to improving other aspects of reading ability such as nonword decoding and oral paragraph reading.

The study is helpful in that it provides enhanced understanding of the neural characteristics of adults with dyslexia as well as how to structure interventions that can improve their neural plasticity.

Skalicky, AE. (2002) . The relationship between early visual processing and reading ability: investigation of temporal processing in adults and children . University of Georgia Theses and Dissertations . http://hdl.handle.net/10724/5745

Search words: reading + fmri + adults + neuroplasticity; Google Scholar; neuroscience.

5. Turkeltaub et al. (2003). Development of neural mechanisms for reading. Nature Neuroscience 6, 767-773

Search words: reading + fMRI in adults; Google Scholar; neuroscience

Pediatric brain imaging has generally excluded studies that investigate the neural development of cognitive skills acquired during childhood. Researchers here compared pediatric brain development during reading tasks to those of adults using fMRI. Their task involved an implicit word-processing task that required detection of a visual feature (tall letters) within both words and matched false font strings. Reading was done using eye-motion.

Researchers studied an unrelated amount of participants whose ages ranged from 6 to 22 years and found that learning to read is associated with two patterns of change in brain activity: increased activity in the left-hemisphere middle temporal and inferior frontal gyri and decreased activity in the right inferotemporal cortical areas. Activity in the left-posterior superior temporal sulcus of the youngest readers was associated with the maturation of their phonological processing abilities.