Profile

Frank Manis

Professor of Psychology

Contact Information
E-mail: manis@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 740-6567
Office: SGM 525A

LINKS
Curriculum Vitae
Faculty Profile on Departmental Website
Neuroscience Graduate Program

Biographical Sketch

Professor Frank Manis is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California, where is he is serving a three-year term as a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Teaching Excellence. He has published about 50 articles on reading disabilities, development of literacy and biliteracy, and cognitive neuropsychology. The major focus of his research has been on the identification of sources of heterogeneity among children with developmental dyslexia. He is currently funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study reading in children and adults with dyslexia. He just finished a 5-year term as editor for Scientific Studies of Reading and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Scientific Studies of Reading and Annals of Dyslexia.

Education

B.A. Psychology, Pomona College, 1975
Ph.D. Psychology, University of Minnesota, 1/1981

Academic Appointment, Affiliation, and Employment History

Assistant to Full Professor, University of Southern California, 09/01/1981-

Description of Research

Summary Statement of Research Interests

My work focuses on the cognitive, psycholinguistic and neurobiological bases of reading in children and adults, dyslexia, learning disabilities, and development of literacy in a second language. Recent projects focusing on dyslexia include an investigation of brain activity in the occipito-temporal junction (or visual word form area) in dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults (with Zhong-Lin Lu, and graduate students Jennifer Bruno, Allison Zumberge and Jason Goldman), experiments on the perception of noise in visual and auditory stimuli (with Lu, graduate student Rachel Beattie, and Jason Batten,B.A. (2008, USC) and fluency-based interventions for middle schoolers with persistent reading problems (with Sally Spencer, education doctoral student). I am also conducting a 9-year ongoing longitudinal study of Spanish-speaking children learning to read, in collaboration with Kim Lindsey, Research Assistant Professor at USC.

Research Keywords

reading, cognitive development, dyslexia, learning disabilities, bilingual reading development

Research Specialties

reading development, dyslexia, learning disabilities, bilingual reading development, cognitive development in children

Detailed Statement of Research Interests

The major goals of my research are to understand how people learn to read and what goes wrong in developmental dyslexia. In order to learn to read, the brain must integrate systems that originally evolved for other purposes, such as linguistic communication and visual perception. In most individuals, the reading network in the brain is quite extensive, and includes the classic left hemisphere language regions where meanings and pronunciations appear to be computed (Wernicke's and Broca's areas) as well as regions that connect visual processing of print to the language network, such as the occipito-temporal junction, also known as the visual word form area (VWFA). Dyslexic individuals struggle to learn to read, and even as adults, show reduced activation in the reading network, including the VWFA, as well as compensatory activation in other regions of the brain. My research group is conducting studies in both children and adults to explore why dyslexic people have so much trouble learning to read, and what their problems can tell us about the normal process of reading. One line of work focuses on VWFA activation in adults with and without dyslexia. In a collaboration with Zhong-Lin Lu and two graduate students, Allison Zumberge (Neuroscience) and Jennifer Bruno (Psychology), I am using a novel fMRI methodology to isolate activation to printed words in the VWFA and analyze the properties of printed words that affect VWFA activation in dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults. The most salient reading problem for dyslexic children involves sounding out unfamiliar words (phonological decoding deficit). This deficit is thought to lead to problems in building up representations of words in the VWFA, and hence is developmentally primary. However, it is unclear what causes the phonological decoding problem. Two seemingly unrelated deficits occur in dyslexic children and adults who have phonological decoding deficits. The first involves visual magnocellular processing, as for example, in pattern recognition under conditions of low visual contrast, or perception of visual motion. The second involves the categorical perception of speech sounds. My colleagues and I think that these two areas of deficiency may be related. In experiments conducted with Anne Sperling (Neuroscience Ph.D., 2004) and Zhong-Lin Lu, we showed that the visual magnocellular deficit only occurred under noisy visual conditions, and furthermore that it was more salient among dyslexic children with oral language delays. In previous work with Patricia Keating (UCLA Phonetics Lab), my research group had demonstrated that the speech perception deficit was more severe among dyslexics with language deficits. We now hypothesize that a problem in forming perceptual categories in a noisy environment might underlie both the visual and auditory perception problems. In an ongoing study with Lu and Keating, I am investigating whether dyslexic children show deficits in noise exclusion with both auditory and visual stimuli, and whether the noise perception problems are associated with poor phonological decoding and word recognition.

Funded Research

Contracts and Grants Awarded

Literacy Development In English Language Learners (Nat Inst of Child Health and Human Dev (NICHHD)), Lindsey, Kim Abkarian, Manis, Franklin R, $1,080,353, 05/01/2003-04/30/2009
Bases Of Normal And Disordered Reading (Nat Inst of Child Health and Human Dev (NICHHD)), Manis, Franklin R, $1,742,626, 04/01/2002-03/31/2009
BASES OF NORMAL AND DISORDERED READING (NIH-NICHHD), Franklin Manis, $1,742,626, 02/01/1996-03/31/2007

Conferences and Other Presentations

Conference Presentations

"Cognitive bases of reading disability in Spanish-English bilingual children", Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Poster, Refereed , Asheville, NC, 2007-2008
"fMRI activation patterns predict reading ability in adults with and without developmental dyslexia", Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Poster, Refereed , San Francisco, CA, 2007-2008
"Development of reading in Spanish speakers in three programs. ", Society for Research in Child Development, Poster, Refereed , Boston, MA, Society for Research in Child Development, 2006-2007
"Occipito-temporal region is sensitive to orthographic familiarity", Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Poster, Refereed , New York, NY, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2006-2007
"Symposium: at the roots of dyslexia theory, a critical re-appraisal of speech perception, phonological and reading problems, discussant’s comments", Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Talk/Oral Presentation, Refereed , Prague, Czech Republic, Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, 2006-2007
"Tracking English language learners’ word decoding and reading comprehension from first grade through seventh grade ", Society for Research in Child Development, Poster, Refereed , Boston, MA, Society for Research in Child Development, 2006-2007

Publications

Book

Reid, G., Fawcett, A. J., Manis, F. R., Siegel, L. S. (2008). The Sage Handbook of Dyslexia. (Reid, G., Fawcett, A. J., Manis, F. R., Siegel, L. S., Ed.). London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Book Chapter

Manis, F. R., Lindsey, K. A. (2008). Exploring heterogeneity in developmental dyslexia: A longitudinal investigation. pp. 149-173. London: The Sage Handbook of Dyslexia.
Manis, F. R., Keating, P. (2005). Speech perception in dyslexic children with and without language impairments. pp. p. 77-99. The connections between language and reading disabilities/Erlbaum.

Journal Article

Bruno, J. L., Zumberge, A. A., Manis, F. R., Lu, Z., Goldman, J. G. (2008). Sensitivity to orthographic familiarity in the occipito-temporal region. NeuroImage. Vol. 39, pp. 1988-2001.
Nakamoto, J., Lindsey, K. A., Manis, F. R. (2007). English language learners’ reading comprehension in English and Spanish. Scientific Studies of Reading/Taylor & Francis Group.
Nakamoto, J., Lindsey, K. A., Manis, F. R. (2007). A Longitudinal Analysis of English language learners word decoding and reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal/Springer. Vol. 20, pp. 691-719.
Bruno, J., Manis, F. R., Keating, P., Sperling, A. J., Nakamoto, J., Seidenberg, M. S. (2007). Auditory word identification in dyslexic and normally achieving readers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology/Elsevier. Vol. 97, pp. 183-204.
Zumberge, A., Baker, L. A., Manis, F. R. (2007). Focus on words: Genetic and environmental influences in reading and inattention. Behavior Genetics/Kluwer Academic Press. Vol. 37, pp. 284-293.
Sperling, A. J., Lu, Z., Manis, F. R., Seidenberg, M. S. (2006). Motion perception deficits and reading impairment: it’s the noise, not the motion. Psychological Science/American Psychological Society. Vol. 17, pp. 1047-1053.
Sperling, A. J., Lu, Z., Manis, F. R., Seidenberg, M. S. (2006). Deficits in achromatic phantom contour perception in poor readers. Neuropsychologia, 44. Vol. 44, pp. 1900-1908.
Sperling, A. J., Lu, Z., Manis, F. R., Seidenberg, M. S. (2005). Deficits in perceptual noise exclusion in developmental dyslexia. Nature Neuroscience/Nature Publishing Group. pp. p. 862-863.
Manis, F. R., Lindsey, K. A., Bailey, C. (2004). Development of Reading in Grades K-2 in Spanish-Speaking English-Language Learners. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice/Council for Exceptional Children. Vol. 19, pp. 214-224.

Lindsey, K. A., Manis, F. R. (2005). Development of reading skills in Spanish-speaking English-. International Dyslexia Association Perspectives.

Multimedia Scholarship and Creative Works

website, The Virtual Child (interactive website published by Pearson Prentice Hall and sold with textbooks), 2006-2007
Website, My Virtual Child (revision of The Virtual Child), 2007-2008

Honors and Awards

USC Center for Excellence in Teaching, Faculty Fellow, Faculty Fellow, 9/1/2006-8/31/2009
USC Innovative Teaching Award, The Virtual Child, 6/1/2003-5/31/2004