Abstract
Much work has been conducted that reports on the strong relationships between speech production and reading behaviour. However, disentangling the relative contribution of the various underlying speech mechanisms (i.e., articulation, somatosensory and/or auditory) that contribute to this relationship remains unknown. Oral stereognosis refers to the ability to discriminate shapes using our tongue/mouth, in the absence of seeing the shape beforehand, and is a measure of the somatosensory sub-system of the speech mechanism. In this work, we aimed to address the extent to which oral stereognosis predicted visual word recognition. Methods: Healthy participants ranging from 18 to 51 years old (N = 60; Mage = 22.7) completed the Florida Oral Recognition Measurement (FORM) task and two visual word recognition tasks. The FORM required participants to identify carrots that were cut into the following letters’ shapes: E, R, T, S, L, N, O, V. Carrot letters were randomly presented to participants. With respect to the visual word recognition tasks, participants were required to press a button: 1) if the letter string spelled a word or 2) if the letter string sounded like a word. Response time and accuracy were measured for all tasks. Results: Participants were divided into high (accuracy >50%) vs. low (accuracy ≦ 50%) oral stereognosis recognition groups. For the high FORM group, oral stereognosis recognition predicted visual word recognition in the spell task (Adj R2 = .114). For the low FORM group, oral stereognosis recognition predicted visual word recognition in the sound task (Adj R2 = .307). Together, these findings provide evidence that oral stereognosis is predictive of word recognition performance, and that performance on the FORM differentially predicts word recognition tasks (spell vs. sound). Overall, these findings inform current print-to-speech frameworks by identifying a relationship between sensorimotor information, specifically, oral stereognosis ability, and reading performance.
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Data will be made available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.
Notes
A power calculation determined that a sample size of N = 47 is needed to meet the following parameters: alpha = 0.05; beta = 0.20; r = 0.40 (medium effect; Hulley et al., 2013).
These letters were chosen because they are common letters used in pronunciation. Using all the letters of the alphabet would have provided too many options so as to make the task nearly impossible. A small pilot study was conducted in the lab to determine that the letters could be differentiated.
While not a primary hypothesis of the current study, we did test the relationship between age and oral stereognosis in our sample and found a positive relationship such that as FORM accuracy increased, so too did age, r = .305, p = .019
To date, there is no standardized approach to classifying individuals as high vs. low oral stereognosis ability. The approach used here was one that was based on standards in the reading literature (Deutsch et al., 2005; Manis et al., 1996;) that uses the sample distribution characteristics. We chose this approach over a dichotomization of the data based on the mean, which has been reported to be equivalent to removing 38% of the data, and substantially reducing power (Cohen, 1983).
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This study was partially funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada in the form of a grant to author JC (grant number: 386617-2012).
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Cummine, J., Huynh, T.K.T., Cullum, A. et al. Chew on this! Oral stereognosis predicts visual word recognition in typical adults. Curr Psychol 42, 3305–3318 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01647-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01647-1