Visual word form processing deficits driven by severity of reading impairments in children with developmental dyslexia.

The visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex is key to fluent reading in children and adults. Diminished VWFA activation during print processing tasks is a common finding in subjects with severe reading problems. Here, we report fMRI data from a multicentre study with 140 children in primary school (7.

Evaluation of a REDCap-based Workflow for Supporting Federal Guidance for Electronic Informed Consent.

Adoption of electronic informed consent (eConsent) for research remains low despite evidence of improved patient comprehension, usability, and workflow processes compared to paper. At our institution, we implemented an eConsent workflow using REDCap, a widely used electronic data capture system. The goal of this study was to evaluate the extent to which the REDCap eConsent solution adhered to federal guidance for eConsent.

Evidence for normal letter-sound integration, but altered language pathways in a case of recovered Landau-Kleffner Syndrome.

Landau-Kleffner Syndrome (LKS) is a rare form of acquired aphasia in children, characterized by epileptic discharges, which occur mostly during sleep. After normal speech and language development, aphasia develops between the ages of 3-7 years in a period ranging from days to months. The epileptic discharges usually disappear after reaching adulthood, but language outcomes are usually poor if no treatment focused on restoration of (non-) verbal communication is given.

Implementing a Clinical Research Management System: One Institution's Successful Approach Following Previous Failures.

Clinical research management systems (CRMSs) can facilitate research billing compliance and clinician awareness of study activities when integrated with practice management and electronic health record systems. However, adoption of CRMSs remains low, and optimal approaches to implementation are unknown. This case report describes one institution's successful approach to organization, technology, and workflow for CRMS implementation following previous failures.

Attentional focus during learning impacts N170 ERP responses to an artificial script.

Reading instruction can direct attention to different unit sizes in print-to-speech mapping, ranging from grapheme-phoneme to whole-word relationships. Thus, attentional focus during learning might influence brain mechanisms recruited during reading, as indexed by the N170 response to visual words. To test this, two groups of adults were trained to read an artificial script under instructions directing attention to grapheme-phoneme versus whole-word associations.

Development of visual expertise for reading: rapid emergence of visual familiarity for an artificial script.

Adults produce left-lateralized N170 responses to visual words relative to control stimuli, even within tasks that do not require active reading. This specialization begins in preschoolers as a right-lateralized N170 effect. We investigated whether this developmental shift reflects an early learning phenomenon, such as attaining visual familiarity with a script, by training adults in an artificial script and measuring N170 responses before and afterward.

fMR-adaptation indicates selectivity to audiovisual content congruency in distributed clusters in human superior temporal cortex.

Background: Efficient multisensory integration is of vital importance for adequate interaction with the environment. In addition to basic binding cues like temporal and spatial coherence, meaningful multisensory information is also bound together by content-based associations. Many functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies propose the (posterior) superior temporal cortex (STC) as the key structure for integrating meaningful multisensory information.

Deviant processing of letters and speech sounds as proximate cause of reading failure: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of dyslexic children.

Learning to associate auditory information of speech sounds with visual information of letters is a first and critical step for becoming a skilled reader in alphabetic languages. Nevertheless, it remains largely unknown which brain areas subserve the learning and automation of such associations. Here, we employ functional magnetic resonance imaging to study letter-speech sound integration in children with and without developmental dyslexia.

Reduced neural integration of letters and speech sounds links phonological and reading deficits in adult dyslexia.

Developmental dyslexia is a specific reading and spelling deficit affecting 4% to 10% of the population. Advances in understanding its origin support a core deficit in phonological processing characterized by difficulties in segmenting spoken words into their minimally discernable speech segments (speech sounds, or phonemes) and underactivation of left superior temporal cortex. A suggested but unproven hypothesis is that this phonological deficit impairs the ability to map speech sounds onto their homologous visual letters, which in turn prevents the attainment of fluent reading levels.

Task-irrelevant visual letters interact with the processing of speech sounds in heteromodal and unimodal cortex.

Letters and speech sounds are the basic units of correspondence between spoken and written language. Associating auditory information of speech sounds with visual information of letters is critical for learning to read; however, the neural mechanisms underlying this association remain poorly understood. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigates the automaticity and behavioral relevance of integrating letters and speech sounds.

The face-specific N170 component is modulated by emotional facial expression.

Background: According to the traditional two-stage model of face processing, the face-specific N170 event-related potential (ERP) is linked to structural encoding of face stimuli, whereas later ERP components are thought to reflect processing of facial affect. This view has recently been challenged by reports of N170 modulations by emotional facial expression. This study examines the time-course and topography of the influence of emotional expression on the N170 response to faces.