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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Visual Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1520367

Adults with reading difficulties demonstrate selective impairments in the fine neural tuning for print

Provisionally accepted
Tongjie Zhuang Tongjie Zhuang 1*Yufei Tan Yufei Tan 2Jiuju Wang Jiuju Wang 3Yao Li Yao Li 4Xiuyue Yue Xiuyue Yue 1Licheng Xue Licheng Xue 5Jing Zhao Jing Zhao 1*
  • 1 Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China
  • 2 Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China
  • 3 Peking University Sixth Hospital, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
  • 4 Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China
  • 5 Hangzhou Polytechnic, Hangzhou, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Neural tuning for print, reflected in differential responses of the N170 component of event-related potentials to orthographic forms and other visual stimuli, serves as the neural basis for efficient visual word reading. Impaired neural tuning for print is well established in dyslexic children. Although many adults also experience reading difficulties, relatively few studies have examined whether such impairments exist in adults, particularly those who read Chinese, which differs markedly in visual and linguistic characteristics from alphabetic scripts. To fill this gap, we assessed 20 highlevel and 16 low-level adult readers who were the two extremes of the best and poorest readers of a database, which consisted of 308 college students. Using ERP techniques, we investigated two levels of neural tuning for print: coarse tuning (i.e., real, pseudo, false characters vs. stroke combinations) and fine tuning (i.e., real vs. pseudo vs. false characters). Results indicated that high-level adult readers exhibited both coarse and fine tuning for print. In contrast, low-level adult readers displayed a stronger N170 response to real and pseudo characters than to stroke combinations, suggesting intact coarse tuning. However, they showed no reliable N170 differences between real, false, and pseudo characters, indicating impaired fine tuning. These findings suggest a selective impairment in fine tuning for print among Chinese adults with reading difficulties and support the notion of persistent impairment in fine neural tuning for print among poor readers throughout development.

    Keywords: reading, neural tuning for print, visual word processing, Chinese characters, N170, reading difficulty

    Received: 31 Oct 2024; Accepted: 27 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Zhuang, Tan, Wang, Li, Yue, Xue and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Tongjie Zhuang, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China
    Jing Zhao, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.