We cordially invite you to the next lecture of the BME Cognitive Seminar Series:

Date & Time: December 3, Monday, 12:00-13:00
Location: BME, XI., Egry József utca 1., T. ép 515.

General and specific factors of reading development

Dénes Tóth, PhD
MTA-TTK
(Hungarian Academy of Sciences - Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology)

web: http://www.mtapi.hu/index.php?mi=419&lang=en&

Abstract

On the psychological level, phonological processing, especially phoneme awareness is regarded as a key factor in early reading development. Based on a large-scale international behavioral study, we present an alternative view instead of the commonly adopted schema which suggests causal or reciprocal cognitive factors. The general (g) factor model of reading presumes a general (mostly genetically determined) factor and several independent specific factors behind reading and reading-related behavioral performance. The model is universal in the sense that it has almost the same structure in several alphabetical orthographies and it also partly explains non-phonological, that is purely orthographic processing. The g factor can be conceived as a specialization ability that certain brain areas not devoted to reading-related processing are able to transform in the first phase of reading acquisition in a way which enables the mapping or recoding of orthographic and phonological information at an elementary level, allowing the automatisation of both phonological and orthographic access. However, the optimization of orthographic processing corresponding to the statistical regularities of a given orthography contains components which are almost fully independent from these processes. We base the latter argument on a large-scale developmental experiment in which the encoding of various visual elements (letters, digits and symbols) and their position was investigated and complex interactions were found, suggesting that the development of orthographic processing also reflects adaptive specialization.

-- 
Attila Keresztes

Junior Research Fellow
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Dept. of Cognitive Science,
Egry József u. 1, Budapest
1111, Hungary
Tel: +36 1 4633525