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Using Representational Similarity Analysis to Examine Print-Speech Integration in Struggling Readers Using fMRI

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Deanne T.O. Wah¹ (dwah@uwo.ca), Kevin Kim¹, Fumiko Hoeft^2,3, Kenneth Pugh^2,3,4, Marc F. Joanisse^1,2; ¹The University of Western Ontario, ²Haskins Laboratories, ³University of Connecticut, ⁴Yale University

The present study examines how struggling readers integrate and represent print and speech information in the brain, and whether this is related to reading ability. Prior behavioural and neuroimaging studies suggest that children with reading difficulty fail to integrate print and speech, with marked differences in cortical response to print-speech congruency. We aim to build on this existing literature by employing multivariate analyses to extract orthographic and phonologic neural representations. Here we focus on pseudoword recognition, to isolate phonological processes, allowing us to address print-speech integration with larger word-like stimuli without activating associated semantic networks. Monolingual English-speaking children ages 7 - 10 (N = 53) performed a pseudoword detection task in the auditory, visual, and audio-visual modalities during fMRI. Using representational similarity analysis, we identified orthographic representations in the bilateral occipital lobe, right SPL, and right SFG. Phonological representations were distributed throughout the brain, notably the bilateral occipital lobe, left ITG, right IPL, right IFG, and more. We further identified patterns of activity reflecting both orthographic and phonological structure in the bilateral occipital cortex and right SFG, potentially indicating shared neural representations. Importantly, stronger phonologic representations in the left posterior STS were related to better phonemic decoding efficiency measured outside the scanner. These findings support theories of literacy acquisition in which early readers rely heavily on phonological representations, with individual differences in these representations predicting phonemic decoding efficiency. Furthermore, it highlights emerging evidence that children maintain partially shared orthographic and phonologic representations for word recognition.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging