PREDICTING READING PERFORMANCE FROM NEUROIMAGING PROFILES - THE CEREBRAL BASIS OF PHONOLOGICAL EFFECTS IN PRINTED WORD IDENTIFICATION

This study linked 2 experimental paradigms for the analytic study of r eading that heretofore have been used separately. Measures on a lexica l decision task designed to isolate phonological effects in the identi fication of printed words were examined in young adults. The results w ere related to previously obtained measures of brain activation patter ns for these participants derived from functional magnetic resonance i maging (fMRI). The FMRI measures were taken as the participants perfor med tasks that were designed to isolate orthographic, phonological, an d lexical-semantic processes in reading. Individual differences in the magnitude of phonological effects in word recognition, as indicated b y spelling-to-sound regularity effects on lexical decision latencies a nd by sensitivity to stimulus length effects, were strongly related to differences in the degree of hemispheric lateralization in 2 cortical regions.