An interesting next step would be to explore how sensorimotor cortex engagement during explicit word comprehension tasks changes across age. This will help disentangle further how word processing strategies and developmental constraints contribute to reduced activation of “embodied” category representations for printed
words in childhood. Due to sluggishness of the BOLD-response, fMRI is not ideal for establishing if sensorimotor cortex responses in word comprehension at different selleck ages result from slow, deliberate word meaning processing or the rapid automatic process reported for skilled adult readers (Hauk et al., 2008 and Kiefer et al., 2008). This issue can be addressed in the future by complementing fMRI measures of sensorimotor cortex activation high in spatial resolution, with EEG measures high in temporal resolution. For example, by comparing the time course of gamma-band
de-synchronisation over the motor cortex (an index of motor cortex activation) during tool versus animal name reading across age. In conclusion, children and adults both showed clear differential cortical specialization when matching tool and animal pictures on basic-level category. However, while adults co-activated the same animal and tool picture-selective cortical regions Dolutegravir chemical structure when performing this task with the pictures’ written names, children did not. This was despite the fact that all children could read and comprehend all names in the Y-27632 2HCl experiment and despite substantial reading proficiency in the older children. This gradual emergence of neural responses thought to play a crucial role in printed word comprehension and its development, suggests that until a relatively late
age and advanced level of reading proficiency, children do not spontaneously experience the sensorimotor meaning of single printed words they read. These results form a first step towards understanding how printed word meaning becomes “embodied” as children learn to link word shapes to word meanings. This work was funded by a European Commission grant MEST-CT-2005-020725 (CBCD) and ITN-CT-2011-28940 (ACT). TMD was partly funded by an Economic & Social Research Council grant RES-061-25-0523, DM is supported in part by a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, MHJ is funded by the UK Medical Research Council, G0701484, and MIS is funded by a National Institutes of Health grant R01 MH 081990 and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. We thank Professor Joseph Devlin and Dr Karin Petrini for help with the data analyses and advice on the manuscript, and Dr Caspar Addyman for help with data collection. “
“Spoken word comprehension is an incremental process – auditory information unfolds over time, partially activating multiple lexical candidates (Marslen-Wilson, 1987).