Dyslexia is a disorder that affects the acquisition and learning of reading and writing that, according to statistics, could affect around 5 to 17% of the population.
Among the most important difficulties that arise in the disorder is a deficit in the ability to analyze phonological information and thus be able to handle the correspondences between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (written letters), which makes it difficult to read and extract the meaning of written materials. Other studies have suggested that abilities such as working memory are also important for reading well.
Recent work carried out by various Norwegian researchers and published in Frontiers in Psychology (2014), has used functional magnetic resonance imaging to find out how the brain of children with dyslexia between 11 and 12 years old works when they are exposed to reading tasks that demand a increasing amount of processing resources.
All participating children (11 with dyslexia and 18 controls without the disorder) completed a battery of dyslexia tests that included non-word reading tasks, real word reading, text reading and spelling, as well as reading comprehension tests. In addition, all of them underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing various tasks of varying demands, such as alphabetic processing, spelling processing, and sentence processing, which are supposed to consume an increasing amount of processing resources.
The group of children with dyslexia showed greater general brain activation than the group of healthy children when performing reading exercises and this difference increased when the demands of the task increased . However, no differences in precision were observed. More specifically, some of the areas in which this greater activity was observed were the right superior frontal gyrus, the left pre-supplementary motor area, the left caudate nucleus or the left middle cingulate cortex, although it seems that there would be some differentiation of areas according to task types (alphabetic, spelling, and sentence processing). According to the authors, this profile of cerebral hyperactivation could be the result of compensatory activity for reading difficulties.
Clearly, not everyone finds learning to read easy, but we certainly do know that reading is an important skill for school achievement. For this reason, it seems highly recommended to motivate children to read and, above all, to enjoy reading. Perhaps knowing studies like the previous one will allow us to create much more specific and adjusted reading support programs that help all those children with difficulties.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
