The influence of formal education and literacy on the cognitive system and its cerebral substrates

FCT – POCTI/41669/PSI/2001

In the present project we intend to evaluate the functional and neurobiological consequences of learning a visual representation (orthography) of auditory-verbal language. This will be done by testing the differences between a well-characterisedliterate and illiterate populations of southern Portugal in cognitive domains such as the language system, visual system and the interaction between the two systems, using different behavioural and electrophysiological paradigms. The main goals of the project are:

  1. a) To analyse in detail the changes at different levels of the sub-lexical phonological representation and processing (phonemic, syllabic, onset and rhyme) introduced by the acquisition of orthographic knowledge;
  2. b) To explore in detail how formal schooling modifies other cognitive functions. In the present project this includes visual decoding, visual scanning skills and visual memory skills;
  3. c) To explore and analyse potential differences in the time-course of neural activities as well as the hemispheric differences, during the different relevant behavioural-cognitive tasks, between different levels of literacy.

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