Naming Abilities and Orthographic Recognition during Childhood an Event-Related Brain Potentials Study

Children with reading disabilities or dyslexia, commonly suffer disturbances in phonological awareness,slow-naming speed, and delayed automatic word recognition. A close relation between naming speed andreading difficulties has been well documented; hence, the former could be a useful early predictor of dyslexia.Reading disabled children usually show orthographic problems, but the neurophysiological basis underlying thedetection of orthographic violations is still unclear. In this study, 28 healthy, right-handed, second-grade childrenwere selected from a wider screening study and divided into two groups according to their performance on arapid-naming test battery- slow-naming (SN) and average-naming (AN). Groups were matched by sex, age andschool grade, and participants were asked to perform a visual recognition task that consisted of two stimuli- aneasily-named drawing followed by a word that either matched (congruent) or did not match (on semantic ororthographic grounds) the drawing. Subjects were instructed to judge the relationship between each pair ofstimuli and then press a key on a keyboard while ERP were being recorded. Behavioral results showedsignificant differences between groups in terms of the number of correct responses, but only for the orthographicviolation condition, as no significant differences were observed in reaction times. In addition, SN showed poorerreading performance compared to AN. ERP were significantly different between the two groups duringprocessing of visual words. Results are interpreted as the expression of the difficulties that SN manifested ingenerating strong associations between phonological and orthographic word forms.