Polish

Are word-reading skills associated with brain activation in vOT during an auditory phonological awareness task in Polish children aged 5 to 7 years old?

Citations: Debska, Wang et al. 2023 in JEP (see original paper).

Findings:

• Using auditory phonological awareness tasks targeting different grain sizes (phonemes vs. rhymes), we examined the brain activity of 5- and 7-year-old Polish-speaking children in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) and its relation to reading skills. Reading skills were assessed using subtests of letter knowledge, sight word reading, and pseudoword reading. To evaluate grain-size effects, we analyzed the anterior and posterior vOT separately, given that the anterior region is associated with larger-grain bigram and trigram representations, whereas the posterior region is linked to smaller-grain letter representations. We found that reading skills were positively associated with activation in the posterior vOT among 5-year-old children and in the anterior vOT among 7-year-old children. However, unlike findings in English, where the relationship shifts from phoneme to rhyme processing, the associations in Polish were consistently observed for the phonemic—but not the rhyme—judgment task.

Educational or practical implications:

• In Polish, decoding words through letter-to-phoneme mapping is consistently effective due to the language’s transparent orthography. Nevertheless, the brain still exhibits a developmental shift from reliance on the posterior to the anterior vOT, suggesting that instruction emphasizing recognition of larger letter patterns remains developmentally appropriate and may support more efficient and faster word recognition.

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