Abstract
Are the brain mechanisms of reading acquisition similar across writing systems? And do similar brain anomalies underlie reading difficulties in alphabetic and ideographic reading systems? In a cross-cultural paradigm, we measured the fMRI responses to words, faces, and houses in 96 Chinese and French 10-year-old children, half of whom were struggling with reading. We observed a reading circuit which was strikingly similar across languages and consisting of the left fusiform gyrus, superior temporal gyrus/sulcus, precentral and middle frontal gyri. Activations in some of these areas were modulated either by language or by reading ability, but without interaction between those factors. In various regions previously associated with dyslexia, reading difficulty affected activation similarly in Chinese and French readers, including the middle frontal gyrus, a region previously described as specifically altered in Chinese. Our analyses reveal a large degree of cross-cultural invariance in the neural correlates of reading acquisition and reading impairment.
Highlights
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
To increase the statistical power of comparisons between controls and dyslexics, we focused on Regions of Interest (ROI)
French children (main effect of Language: F (1,92) = 60.94, p = 0.001), there was no significant effect of dyslexia (F (1,92) < 1) nor Language × Dyslexia interaction (F (1,92) < 1)
Summary
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. 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 interindividual 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 sound-character mappings vary on several dimensions across writings, including granularity, complexity, transparency, and consistency All these factors may influence the speed and effectiveness with which children learn to read, and at least one of these dimensions, orthographic transparency, has been robustly reported to affect reading acquisition in Western languages [3], with a reported impact on brain activation in the reading circuit [4]. Grapheme-phoneme correspondences are arbitrary and have been shown to depend on a precise region of the visual system, the visual word form area (VWFA) and on the posterior superior temporal cortex, as shown by numerous brain imaging studies in adult readers [5,6,7]
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