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Neural Dissociation in Morphological Processing among Chinese-speaking Children with Dyslexia: An fNIRS Study
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Chih-Ling Fang1, Shiou-Yuan Chen2, Li-Ying Fan3, Hsin-Chin Chen4, Tai-Li Chou1; 1National Taiwan University, 2University of Taipei, 3National Taipei University of Education, 4National Chung Cheng University
While developmental dyslexia is a global neurodevelopmental disorder, its neural manifestations vary significantly across languages, and inconsistent findings have tried to explain such differences. Some studies emphasize the importance of phonological awareness (PA) in alphabetic languages such as English (Kovelman et al., 2012), whereas others argue that morphological awareness (MA) plays a more significant role (Arredondo et al., 2015; James et al., 2012; McBride‐Chang et al., 2011). Furthermore, alphabetic languages like English are different from the unique logographic nature of Chinese. In Chinese, the mapping between orthography and phonology is relatively indirect, and phonological cues are often ambiguous (Pan et al., 2021); instead, each character contributes to a morpheme. Therefore, some argue that Chinese reading processing relies more on MA, suggesting distinct brain activation patterns during Chinese reading from alphabetic languages. While MA seems a stronger predictor of Chinese fluent reading than PA (Xu et al., 2024), its underlying neural compensatory mechanisms remain under-explored, and even less is known about whether Chinese-speaking dyslexic children utilize alternative neural pathways to process morphemic structures than typical Chinese readers. To find out the neural difference between Chinese speaking children with and without dyslexia, this study utilized functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine the neural underpinnings of Chinese morphological processing in children (ages 7–12) with and without dyslexia. The study recruited 60 children, 30 typically developing (TD) and 30 with developmental dyslexia (DD), matched by age. They completed a Chinese morphological selection task, during which they listened to a string of three words, each word composed of two characters, and then selected the word morphologically related to the target while ignoring the distractor. Morphological relatedness in this task is defined at the character level, as each character serves as a morpheme. For example, chicken thigh (雞腿, /tɕi˥ tʰweɪ˨˩˦/ ) and chicken egg (雞蛋, /tɕi˥ tan˥˩/) share the character 「雞 (/tɕi˥/) 」, which contributes the meaning “chicken” and are thus morphologically related. In contrast, distractors such as “machine (機器, /tɕi˥ tɕʰi˥˩/) contains a character that shares the same sound (/tɕi˥/) as the target but represents a different morpheme (「機」) with an unrelated meaning. With such phonological similarity, this design requires children to focus on the morphological structure of each word and ignore the phonological similarity. Our results revealed significant group neurofunctional dissociation. TD children showed greater activation in the bilateral dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG), suggesting stronger engagement in morphological decomposition and morpho-syntactic processing (Arredondo et al., 2015; Eggleston et al., 2024; Kim & Nam, 2025). However, children with dyslexia didn’t exhibit comparable dIFG engagement but instead an increased recruitment of the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), an area typically associated with the storage of long-term morphological representations and semantic processing. This neural pattern aligns with recent findings (Eggleston et al., 2024) and may reflect different processing strategies between groups, with TD children relying more on dIFG-mediated structure-based processing and DD children showing greater MTG recruitment during morphological processing.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, Morphology