Differences between good and poor child writers on fMRI contrasts for writing newly taught and highly practiced letter forms

Abstract

During fMRI imaging, 12 good and 8 poor writers aged 11 wrote a newly taught pseudoletter and a highly practiced letter. Both letters were formed from the same components, but the pseudoletter had a novel configuration not corresponding to a written English letter form. On the first fMRI contrast between the newly taught pseudoletter and highly practiced letter, based on a group map, good and poor writers significantly activated many common regions; but the poor writers showed spatially more extensive brain activation than did the good writers. The additional regions of significant activation may reflect inefficiency in learning a new letter form. For the second contrast between the highly practiced and newly taught letters, individual brain activation analyses, based on exact clusters, showed that good and poor writers differed significantly in activation only in left fusiform. This individual fusiform activation correlated significantly with behavioral measures of automatic letter writing and expressive orthographic coding. Multiple regression in which both individual fusiform activation and individual orthographic coding were entered explained significant variance in written composition. Results are discussed in reference to the role of the orthographic loop, from internal letter form to external letter writing by hand, in writing letters and composing. The overall results are consistent with prior brain and behavioral studies of writing.

The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children

“…The left precentral gyrus has also been shown to be recruited during letter writing [39,58] and letter perception [33]. Thus, we show here that letter perception activates regions that are recruited during letter writing, similar to Longcamp et al [41] and James and Gauthier [33], but only if the observer has practice printing letters.…”

“…Further, our results show bilateral activation of the precentral gyrus rather than unilateral as demonstrated in previous work [39,58]. However, these previous findings tested seasoned readers and writers [41,33].…”

“…Interestingly, an electrophysiology study also found involvement of the IFG during writing, and although this region does not usually emerge as active during writing using fMRI (e.g. [50,58]), it has been shown to be active during letter perception [20,33], although not as commonly as other premotor regions in the frontal lobe. Interestingly, in the present study, the IFG does not emerge as significantly active during all letter perception conditions, only during perception of letters that were printed or traced—perhaps this specificity may account for why the recruitment of the region is variable among studies.…”

Copying skills in relation to word reading and writing in Chinese children with and without dyslexia

“…Our copying tasks were untimed because children with dyslexia are often slower than those without dyslexia on a variety of cognitive tasks (e.g., Vellutino, 1979) and we did not want potential differences across groups to be attributable to speed per se. However, automaticity of writing may be one important aspect to consider in copying overall (e.g., Berninger et al, 2008;Richards et al, 2011;Tseng & Chow, 2000). In addition, because a critical aspect of Chinese copying is the order in which strokes are written, the visual-motor component of copying strokes, radicals, and characters (i.e., the ability to remember and consistently execute a given order in writing [Law et al, 1998]) should be explored in future work.…”

Brain Study Analyzer using Handwriting (BASH)

“…In the writer, researcher use right side of brain some use left side of brain that's why their characteristic different in their personality [7]. …”