# Mapping the Neurocognitive Architecture of Reading

> **NIH NIH F30** · GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $51,036

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
 One in five stroke survivors in the United States live with chronic aphasia, a persistent loss of language. Most
people with aphasia also have difficulty reading, but the cognitive and neural bases for co-morbid deficits in
reading and language are not fully understood. Loss of reading ability, or alexia, causes significant difficulty in
activities of daily living. Reading is a recent cultural acquisition in evolutionary time, and children require years
of schooling to develop literacy. Thus, normal reading is thought to be parasitic on more general cognitive and
neural systems. Parallel to healthy reading, alexia is hypothesized to reflect insult to more general cognitive and
neural systems. Despite this proposition, how language deficits in stroke translate to non-visual reading deficits
is underspecified. Moreover, despite strong evidence that white matter disconnections are crucial determiners
of language outcomes in chronic stroke, the role of structural disconnections in alexia is not known. This lesion
study aims to dissect component cognitive systems and brain connections critical for reading.
 Normally, reading involves a cooperative division of labor between phonological and semantic processes.
Acquired deficits in these reading processes manifest as difficulty reading specific word types. Particularly,
effects of lexicality (word vs. pseudoword), orthographic regularity (regular vs. irregular spelling-sound
mappings), and imageability (poor vs. rich mental imagery) define phonological and semantic reading deficits.
Preliminary cortical lesion-symptom mapping and behavioral data from a previously collected group of chronic
stroke survivors suggest that specific word types are differentially dependent on phonological and semantic
subprocesses, including articulatory coding, auditory-motor integration, and executive control over semantic
representations. This previous study’s abridged reading battery and lack of structural connectome data limited
the behavioral relationships we were able to observe, and precluded measurement of key white matter pathways.
 This prospective study of chronic left hemisphere stroke will identify the cognitive deficits (Aim 1) and
structural disconnections (Aim 2) underlying alexia through integration of rigorous behavioral testing with
structural connectome-symptom mapping (NIDCD Voice, Speech, and Language Program: Language & Literacy
mission areas). The main hypothesis is that post-stroke effects of lexicality, regularity, and imageability on
reading relate differentially to deficits in phonological and semantic subprocesses. Generalized linear mixed
modeling will determine associations between behavioral measures of articulatory coding, auditory-motor
integration, semantic control, and semantic representation with reading deficits along the axes of lexicality,
regularity, and imageability. Structural connectome-symptom mapping will determine disconnections associated
with reading ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10147675
- **Project number:** 5F30DC018215-03
- **Recipient organization:** GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Jonathan Vivian Dickens
- **Activity code:** F30 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $51,036
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-05-01 → 2024-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10147675

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10147675, Mapping the Neurocognitive Architecture of Reading (5F30DC018215-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10147675. Licensed CC0.

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