Ryan Raybuck
Pronouns: He/HimHis
Research Mentor(s): Ioulia Kovelman
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology and CHGD / LSA
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Session 4 – 2:40pm – 3:30 pm
Room: League Ballroom
Authors: Ryan Raybuck, Rachel Eggleston, Ioulia Kovelman
Presenter: 20
Abstract
The brain is highly active during reading, and many parts of the brain work together to understand words and sentences. The temporal lobe handles phonological awareness while the frontal lobe is responsible for reading fluency, comprehension, speech production, and grammatical usage. A significant factor in reading is morphological awareness, which is the sensitivity to units of meaning in language. When the simplest parts of a word (morphemes) are removed or added, they have the ability to change the meaning of the word. For example, the word “unbreakable†is made up of the morphemes “un-“, “break”, and “-able.†When any of these components is removed, the meaning and context of the word is altered. Morphological awareness is critical in reading when children come across a word they have never seen before. If they are able to identify smaller parts of that word (a prefix, root word, or suffix), then they can put those meanings together to get an idea of the whole word’s meaning. So how does brain activation during an auditory morphology task predict visual morphology performance? Roughly fifty children, ages six to ten, with typical brain development were issued two different tests. During the first test, participants were administered an audio morphology task. Throughout the task, participants’ brain activity was recorded using fNIRS neuroimaging. In the second test, which occurred approximately 18 months later, participants were given morphology tasks that included audio and visual stimuli. However, fNIRS neuroimaging was not used during the second administration. We anticipate that children with stronger temporal activation (STG/MTG) during the first test will have better performance on visual morphology tasks during the second test. This study has the potential to influence theories of morphological processing during reading development.
Biomedical Sciences, Interdisciplinary
