The rise and fall of rapid occipito-temporal sensitivity to letters: Transient specialization through elementary school.

ABSTRACT: Letters, foundational units of alphabetic writing systems, are quintessential to human culture. The ability to read, indispensable to perform in today's society, necessitates a reorganization of visual cortex for fast letter recognition, but the developmental course of this process has not yet been characterized. Here, we show the emergence of visual sensitivity to letters across five electroencephalography measurements from kindergarten and throughout elementary school and relate this development to emerging reading skills. We examined the visual N1, the electrophysiological correlate of ventral occipito-temporal cortex activation in 65 children at varying familial risk for dyslexia. N1 letter sensitivity emerged in first grade, when letter sound knowledge gains were most pronounced and d

SUBMITTER: Fraga-Gonzalez G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8141525 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature