University of Alberta“There’s really not a lot of resources for adults who have reading challenges,” said Jacqueline Cummine, a professor in the department of communication sciences and disorders at the University of Alberta’s faculty of rehabilitation medicine.
Reading and reading impairments have been long-time interests for Cummine. One of her Neuroscience and Literacy Lab’s interests is the role of the cerebellum. This is the part of the brain associated with motor co-ordination, balance, and more complex tasks like reading and spelling. The cerebellum puts together the letters we see and the sounds they make, contributing to fluency in reading and speech production. It’s a research niche that started only in the last twenty to thirty years.
“When you think about how we learn to read, we are actually relying on a lot of co-ordinated movements in our speech system. … we need to learn how to co-ordinate … that the letter C makes the sound ‘kuh,’ the letter A makes the sound ‘ah,’ the letter T makes the sound ‘tuh,’ and be able to sequence those sounds together to come up with a fluent production such as ‘cat,’” Cummine explained.
Strong connections link the cerebellum and cerebrum during reading
Most recently, her lab discovered that there was no difference in the strength of connections between the cerebellum and cerebral cortex in adult English speakers with and without reading impairments like dyslexia. The cerebral cortex is the part of the brain responsible for higher functions like thought, memory, and voluntary movement.
Individuals with reading impairments still had reduced accuracy and slower response times compared to the control group. This suggested that other brain regions may be involved or be functioning differently in individuals with reading impairments.
Cummine’s study also found that several regions in the cerebellum were strongly connected to multiple regions in the cerebrum. A similar study done in Chinese first language speakers found that cerebellar-cerebral connections were based on a one-to-one correspondence.
Cummine explained, “a region in the cerebellum … that was responsible for recognizing print would also be related to a region in the cerebrum that was responsible for recognizing print” in the study on Chinese speakers. This difference hints that language may shape the connections between the cerebellum and cerebrum that facilitate reading and spelling.
Transforming literacy support
Cummine aims to use these findings to further our understanding of how the cerebellum affects literacy in people with reading impairments to develop targeted interventions that improve reading and spelling outcomes.
One avenue of exploration is the connections between the cerebellum and subcortical structures in the brains of people with and without reading impairments.
Another valuable future direction involves comparing results of interventions that target common areas of struggle, such as sound representation and fluency, to make predictions about the cerebellum’s involvement in reading performance.
These predictions can better our understanding of which targeted interventions have the greatest impact on cerebellar connections, hopefully improving literacy outcomes.
