A common left occipito-temporal dysfunction in developmental dyslexia and acquired letter-by-letter reading?
BACKGROUND
We used fMRI to examine functional brain abnormalities of German-speaking dyslexics who suffer from slow effortful reading but not from a reading accuracy problem. Similar to acquired cases of letter-by-letter reading, the developmental cases exhibited an abnormal strong effect of length (i.e., number of letters) on response time for words and pseudowords.


RESULTS
Corresponding to lesions of left occipito-temporal (OT) regions in acquired cases, we found a dysfunction of this region in our developmental cases who failed to exhibit responsiveness of left OT regions to the length of words and pseudowords. This abnormality in the left OT cortex was accompanied by absent responsiveness to increased sublexical reading demands in phonological inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) regions. Interestingly, there was no abnormality in the left superior temporal cortex which--corresponding to the onological deficit explanation--is considered to be the prime locus of the reading difficulties of developmental dyslexia cases.


CONCLUSIONS
The present functional imaging results suggest that developmental dyslexia similar to acquired letter-by-letter reading is due to a primary dysfunction of left OT regions.
Richlan
Fabio
F
Department of Psychology and Center for Neurocognitive Research, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria. fabio.richlan@sbg.ac.at
Sturm
Denise
D
Schurz
Matthias
M
Kronbichler
Martin
M
Ladurner
Gunther
G
Wimmer
Heinz
H
D000293:Adolescent; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D004411:Dyslexia, Acquired / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology*; D011932:Reading; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology*; D055815:Young Adult