Evaluating the Impact of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation on Learning and Consolidation of Phonologically Similar Novel Spoken Words

The study will employ a within-subjects design with two groups of participants (20 typically developing youth and 20 older youth with reading difficulties, aged 16-21). Participants will complete visual phonological discrimination tasks, spoken artificial lexicon learning, and novel word retention tasks following either active or sham rTMS applied to a dorsal stream node of the reading network. Exploratory analyses will also evaluate associations between baseline neural activation variability (measured during a functional magnetic resonance imaging task) and individual differences in the magnitude of modulatory effects observed.