Are word-reading skills associated with brain activation in vOT during an auditory phonological awareness task in Polish children aged 5 to 7 years old?

Citations: Debska, Wang et al. 2023 in JEP (see original paper).

Findings:

• Using auditory phonological awareness tasks targeting different grain sizes (phonemes vs. rhymes), we examined the brain activity of 5- and 7-year-old Polish-speaking children in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) and its relation to reading skills. Reading skills were assessed using subtests of letter knowledge, sight word reading, and pseudoword reading. To evaluate grain-size effects, we analyzed the anterior and posterior vOT separately, given that the anterior region is associated with larger-grain bigram and trigram representations, whereas the posterior region is linked to smaller-grain letter representations. We found that reading skills were positively associated with activation in the posterior vOT among 5-year-old children and in the anterior vOT among 7-year-old children. However, unlike findings in English, where the relationship shifts from phoneme to rhyme processing, the associations in Polish were consistently observed for the phonemic—but not the rhyme—judgment task.
  
• Beyond specialization, we examined neural sensitivity by comparing harder versus easier conditions within each task. In 7-year-old children, the dorsal IFG emerged as a shared region showing greater activation for harder than easier conditions across both language tasks. In contrast, by age 9, only linguistically specialized regions showed increased activation for harder conditions. This developmental shift—from reliance on domain-general to domain-specific brain regions for challenging language tasks—suggests continued fine-tuning of neural specialization for phonological and semantic processing through approximately ages 9–10.

Are word-reading skills associated with brain activation in vOT during an auditory phonological awareness task in Polish children aged 5 to 7 years old?