Neural Correlates of Normal Reading Development and Reading Disorders in Chinese: Preliminary Findings from Event-related Potentials

Abstract

Introduction Successful word recognition during reading requires efficient processing of orthographic input and rapid access to phonological and semantic information, and integration among these lexical constituents. The present study has gone beyond previous investigations of developmental dyslexia in Chinese based on behavioral measures of lexical and cognitive deficits (e.g. Chung et al., 2010; Ho et al., 2002; Shu et al., 2006), and examined neural correlates using event-related potentials (ERPs) to reflect lexical processing at different levels in a character decision task by children of normal and poor reading performances. Method The participants were six poor readers (PR) and 10 chronologically age-matched normal readers (CA) from mainstream primary schools in Hong Kong. Their performance on a range of language and cognitive tasks are shown in Table 1. All participants had normal non-verbal intelligence. In the lexical decision task, the child was instructed to press different response buttons to indicate whether they had or had not learned the target character. The stimuli included 160 characters learned by Primary 2, and 160 pseudo characters created by randomly combining the phonetic and semantic radicals of the real character stimuli in accordance to orthographic rules. Half of the real characters were phonologically regular characters and the other half irregular characters.....