14.8.2020: What happens in the brain when we learn the sound of a letter (Xu)
Opponent Professor Milene Bonte (Maastrict University) and Custos Professor Jarmo Hämäläinen (Ģֱ). The public defense is held in English.
What happens in the brain when we learn the sound of a letter
Learning to associate written letters with speech sounds is a crucial step for children learning to read in alphabetic languages. This process takes years to be fully automatic in our brain, and failure to automatize letter-speech sound integration is related to reading difficulties.
The dissertation investigates the changes in brain activity when we first learn the sound of a letter. The other main question was what kind of cognitive abilities are important for children to convert the letters to their corresponding speech sounds.
“We found that several posterior brain regions are important for learning the letter-speech sound associations. The brain activity in these regions changes rapidly as we learn the sound of a letter, and the activities in these brain regions are also correlated with skills that children need for learning to read” says Weiyong Xu, the main author of the papers.
Furthermore, other types of writing systems might activate the brain differently. For example, in Chinese the visual character combines both the sound and meaning. Chinese readers show partly similar brain activity to alphabetic readers, but with additional frontal brain regions for processing the meaning of characters.
Overall, the results from this dissertation provide a more refined picture of how we learn letter-speech sound associations. The results help us better understand the brain mechanisms of reading difficulties and provide new foundations for the design of tools for early identification of reading problems in children.
The results were obtained using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that measures small magnetic fluctuations produced by changes in brain activity. Participants were both adult speakers of Finnish and Chinese as well as Finnish speaking children. The studies were conducted at the Department of Psychology, Ģֱ, Finland.
Funding
This thesis was supported by the European Union H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)-ITN-2014-ETN Programme, “Advancing brain research in children’s developmental neurocognitive disorders” project, “Understanding and predicting developmental language abilities and disorders in multilingual Europe” project and the Academy of Finland.
Master of Engineering Weiyong Xu defends his doctoral dissertation in subject "Brain activity changes related to learning of audiovisual associations in reading". 14.8.2020 12:00. Opponent is Professor Milene Bonte (Maastrict University) and Custos Professor Jarmo Hämäläinen (Ģֱ). The public defense is held in English.
If a member of the audience wants to ask questions at the end of the public examination, it is possible to call the Custos. The phone number of the Custos is: +358408053490.
Link to the doctoral dissertation event:
Backround information
Weiyong Xu received his bachelor’s degree (2013) and master’s degree (2015) in Biomedical Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. After that, he has been working as an Early Stage Researcher (ESR) in the European Innovative Training Network (ETN) project ChildBrain, and also as a doctoral student at the Department of Psychology, Ģֱ.
Further information
Weiyong Xu, weiyong.w.xu@jyu.fi, +358468448471
Communications Specialist Anitta Kananen, tel. +358 40 8461395, anitta.kananen@jyu.fi
Publication:
Jyväskylä: Ģֱ, 2020, 70 p. JYU Dissertations number 249, Jyväskylä 2020; ISSN 2489-9003; 249; ISBN 978-951-39-8220-1 (PDF)