RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Shared anomalies in cortical reading networks in Chinese and French dyslexic children
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 834945
DO 10.1101/834945
A1 Feng, Xiaoxia
A1 Altarelli, Irene
A1 Monzalvo, Karla
A1 Ding, Guosheng
A1 Ramus, Franck
A1 Shu, Hua
A1 Dehaene, Stanislas
A1 Meng, Xiangzhi
A1 Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/08/834945.abstract
AB To determine whether the neural anomalies underlying developmental dyslexia are universal across languages or influenced by the writing system, we tested 10-year-old Chinese and French children, with or without dyslexia, in a cross-cultural fMRI paradigm. We compared their brain responses to words written in their known script, faces and houses while they were asked to detect a rarely presented star. We observed that impaired reading scores were correlated with a decreased activation to words in several key regions of the reading circuit, including left fusiform gyrus, superior temporal gyrus/sulcus, precentral and middle frontal gyrus. In ROIs previously reported as sensitive to dyslexia, we observed main effects of dyslexia common to Chinese and French readers, without interaction with the children’s native language, suggesting a cross-cultural invariance in the neural anomalies underlying dyslexia. Multivariate pattern analyses further confirmed that dyslexics exhibit a reduced activation to written words in the left fusiform gyrus and left posterior superior temporal gyrus, and not merely a greater inter-individual variability. The impairments in these regions may reflect the causes as well as the consequences of orthographic and phonological deficits in dyslexia in different languages. The current study highlights the existence of common brain mechanisms for dyslexia even in highly different writing systems.