Christodoulou-DelTufo-2014
Authors: Joanna A Christodoulou, Stephanie N Del Tufo, John Lymberis, Patricia K Saxler, Satrajit S Ghosh, Christina Triantafyllou, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, John D E Gabrieli.
Article: Brain Bases of Reading Fluency in Typical Reading and Impaired Fluency in Dyslexia.
Publication: PLoS ONE 9(7): e100552 2014 | DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0100552
Abstract
Although the neural systems supporting single word reading are well studied, there are limited direct comparisons between typical and dyslexic readers of the neural correlates of reading fluency. Reading fluency deficits are a persistent behavioral marker of dyslexia into adulthood. The current study identified the neural correlates of fluent reading in typical and dyslexic adult readers, using sentences presented in a word-by-word format in which single words were presented sequentially at fixed rates. Sentences were presented at slow, medium, and fast rates, and participants were asked to decide whether each sentence did or did not make sense semantically. As presentation rates increased, participants became less accurate and slower at making judgments, with comprehension accuracy decreasing disproportionately for dyslexic readers. In-scanner performance on the sentence task correlated significantly with standardized clinical measures of both reading fluency and phonological awareness. Both typical readers and readers with dyslexia exhibited widespread, bilateral increases in activation that corresponded to increases in presentation rate. Typical readers exhibited significantly larger gains in activation as a function of faster presentation rates than readers with dyslexia in several areas, including left prefrontal and left superior temporal regions associated with semantic retrieval and semantic and phonological representations. Group differences were more extensive when behavioral differences between conditions were equated across groups. These findings suggest a brain basis for impaired reading fluency in dyslexia, specifically a failure of brain regions involved in semantic retrieval and semantic and phonological representations to become fully engaged for comprehension at rapid reading rates.
Christodoulou JA, Del Tufo SN, Lymberis J, Saxler PK, Ghosh SS, et al. (2014) Brain Bases of Reading Fluency in Typical Reading and Impaired Fluency in Dyslexia. PLoS ONE 9(7): e100552. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0100552
The most striking group differences occurred in left-hemisphere cortical regions implicated in semantic processing and required to perform the semantic analyses of the sentences. The present study, however, cannot determine what kinds of processing bottlenecks in the brain restricted the flow of information to brain regions involved in semantic analysis and judgment. Such bottlenecks may have been due to slow phonological decoding of single words, or impaired temporal processing that limited coordination of reading processes across words. The absence of a group difference in VWFA suggests the dyslexic group may not have been limited by the rate of orthographic processing per se, but only more targeted experiments can better elucidate the bases of the fluency impairment.
The activation differences between the groups could reveal the cause or the consequence of impaired fluency in dyslexia (or both). One approach towards this issue of interpretation is to compare typical and dyslexic groups under conditions where behavioral performance or comprehension is equated. This analytic approach was possible by comparing the difference between slow and medium rates in the dyslexic group to the difference between slow and fast rates in the typical reading group, because these comparisons did not show significant accuracy differences between the groups. When reading accuracies across conditions were equated, however, there remained large brain activation differences between the groups. Therefore, the activation differences between groups were not simply the consequence of worse performance by the group with dyslexia. Rather, weakened engagement of brain regions associated with semantic processing and automated reading may reflect the cause of the fluency deficits that make reading comprehension so challenging for many readers with dyslexia
