Abstract
Functional neuroimaging research has identified multiple brain regions supporting reading-related activity in typical and atypical readers across different alphabetic languages. Previous meta-analyses performed on these functional magnetic resonance imaging findings typically report significant between-group contrasts comparing typical readers and readers with reading difficulty or a clinical diagnosis of developmental dyslexia. In order to advance our understanding of cross-linguistic convergence of reading-related brain activations for these reader groups, analyses using activation likelihood estimation were carried out separately for typical and atypical readers who ranged from children to adults. Contrasts were analyzed for tasks involving rhyming or reading of letter or word stimuli presented visually in English, Dutch, Italian, German, French, or Norwegian. Typical readers showed reliable activation in only left lateralized regions, including the inferior frontal area, precentral area and middle temporal gyrus. Atypical readers also showed activation in the left inferior frontal area and precentral region, in addition to significant activations in the right hemisphere, including the superior, medial and inferior frontal regions, lingual gyrus and the inferior occipital area. These results distinguish between typical and atypical reader group activations, showing common and distinct regions of activation when engaged in reading-related activities, extending previous meta-analyses on identifying brain regions relevant to reading to include cross-linguistic analyses for alphabetic scripts. Results support the universality of a signature pattern of brain activation in developmental dyslexia across alphabetic languages.
Highlights
Reading involves translating written symbols to sounds in order to extract meaning
Consistent with previous research, typical readers showed activation in left frontal and temporal regions when engaging in reading-related tasks, with the largest clusters observed in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG; BA 44) and left precentral gyrus (BA 6)
Since half of the studies included in the analysis were conducted in English, we further investigated whether the reported regions were biased toward English, which has a higher entropy between phonemes and graphemes relative to other alphabetic languages in the analysis (Borgwaldt et al, 2005; Ziegler et al, 2010)
Summary
Reading involves translating written symbols to sounds in order to extract meaning. This process is complex, and to be fluent, readers coordinate multiple skills such as word decoding and reading rate effectively and simultaneously so that they can attend to comprehension demands from the text (LaBerge and Samuels, 1974; Stanovich, 1986). Significant research effort has been dedicated to understanding individual differences in reading development, including multiple perspectives of research spanning social (e.g., Schaffner et al, 2013), cognitive (e.g., Fuchs et al, 2012), genetic (e.g., Astrom et al, 2012), and brain activation patterns (e.g., Yamada et al, 2011). For functional neuroimaging research in particular, accumulating research has established a set of brain regions that has been shown to support reading-related activities in typical readers in contrast to struggling readers (for a review, see Gabrieli et al, 2010; Blomert, 2011)
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