title: Children with dyslexia show cortical hyperactivation in response to increasing literacy processing demands.
abstract: This fMRI study aimed to examine how differences in literacy processing demands may affect cortical activation patterns in 11- to 12-year-old children with dyslexia as compared to children with typical reading skills. Eleven children with and 18 without dyslexia were assessed using a reading paradigm based on different stages of literacy development. In the analyses, six regions showed an interaction effect between group and condition in a factorial ANOVA. These regions were selected as regions of interest (ROI) for further analyses. Overall, the dyslexia group showed cortical hyperactivation compared to the typical group. The difference between the groups tended to increase with increasing processing demands. Differences in cortical activation were not reflected in in-scanner reading performance. The six regions further grouped into three patterns, which are discussed in terms of processing demands, compensatory mechanisms, orthography and contextual facilitation. We conclude that the observed hyperactivation is chiefly a result of compensatory activity, modulated by other factors.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen Bergen, Norway.
authors.forename: Frøydis
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Morken
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen Bergen, Norway ; Department of Teacher Training and Pedagogy, UiT The Arctic University of Norway Tromsø, Norway.
authors.forename: Turid
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Helland
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen Bergen, Norway ; Division of Psychiatry, Haukeland University Hospital Bergen, Norway ; Department of Radiology, Haukeland University Hospital Bergen, Norway ; Department of Biomedicine, KG Jebsen Center for Neuropsychiatric Disorders, University of Bergen Bergen, Norway.
authors.forename: Kenneth
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hugdahl
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen Bergen, Norway ; Department of Clinical Engineering, Haukeland University Hospital Bergen, Norway.
authors.forename: Karsten
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Specht
keywords: attention; compensatory; dyslexia; orthography; processing demands; sentence processing