Until now it was thought that dyslexics did not correctly represent the sounds they heard in the brain. However, new research has shed light on what happens in the brains of people with dyslexia. According to the researchers, the problem is not that the representation is bad but that the connections between the auditory and speech centers are not correct.
Children with dyslexia (about 5 to 10 percent of students) have great trouble learning. Despite what many people think, it is not the difficulty when writing, but a literacy learning disorder that makes it difficult to decode or read words. It usually manifests itself in children by their difficulty in reciting the alphabet, rhyming or mastering vowels and consonants. The consequences are well known, but until now it was not known what exactly happens in the brains of dyslexic people.
When we learn to read, the brain creates connections between symbols and words. The team led by Bart Boets, a clinical psychologist at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, analyzed brain scans of patients with and without dyslexia . Using a technique known as multivoxel patterning, they analyzed brain signals on a very small scale as people listened to snippets of similar syllables such as “ba” and “da.” To their surprise, they found that the phonetic representations remained intact, but that the connections between different parts of the brain related to learning were not correct.
” The problem seems to lie in the path we take when it comes to producing and assembling speech sounds when we read aloud,” explains Guinevere Eden, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington.
This finding recently published in Nature has provided a new and innovative approach to this problem and is expected to open a research door to improve children’s learning.
