Difficulties with Audiovisual Processing Contributes to Childhood Dyslexia

Summary: A new neuroimaging study reveals tasks that require audiovisual processing are extremely difficult for children with dyslexia. The findings could lead to new tests that help identify the disorder before children fall behind their peers.

Source: University at Buffalo.

A University at Buffalo psychologist has published a neuroimaging study that could help develop tests for early identification of dyslexia, a disorder that effects 80 percent of those diagnosed with difficulties reading, writing and spelling.

Tasks which require audiovisual processing are especially challenging for children with dyslexia, according to Chris McNorgan, an assistant professor in UB’s psychology department and project lead for the research published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Designing tests sensitive to the problem of audiovisual integration could determine the presence of a disorder that often goes undetected during the early years of elementary education since many children with dyslexia are considered, initially, as simply being on the lower end of a normal range of reading levels.

“Until these kids with dyslexia are lagging so far behind their peers, there’s no way to reasonably assume that they’re not part of a continuum of ability, but rather a separate group altogether,” says McNorgan.

The study’s results suggest that the reading difficulty associated with dyslexia stems from a lack of coordinated processing in the four brain areas known as “the reading network.”

“We find that the organization of the brain outside of the core reading network does not appear to be related to how well or poorly dyslexic children read,” says McNorgan, an expert in neuroimaging and computational modeling. “This is notable because it would be consistent with dyslexia as a problem related to the wiring specifically of the brain areas associated with integrating auditory and visual information, and not with some other general cognitive disruption, such as memory or attention.”

Unlike much previous research on dyslexia that focused on the strength of connections in the reading network, McNorgan and his colleagues looked not only at that strength, but also the manner in which these regions are connected, a critical point in order to better understand dyslexia.

“To think of the ‘manner’ of connections, by way of analogy, as being separate from ‘strength,’ a city planner trying to optimize traffic flow is probably not going to be successful by just dropping a multi-lane highway down the middle of a city if the neighborhoods and other city streets are not organized in a way that can take advantage of the extra traffic capacity.

“While connection strength is absolutely an important factor, our results indicate that it is only one of several components of the brain network that is optimized for fluent reading through practice.”

In cases of dyslexia, there is no problem with how someone’s eyes or how someone’s ears work. But reading isn’t about just what’s seen and heard; it’s a multisensory task that involves decoding letters into their associated speech sounds.

“Don’t imagine someone as seeing words with scrambled letters or seeing letters upside down,” explains McNorgan. “Dyslexia is about being unable to figure out how a particular sequence of letters fits together and then mapping that sequence to a particular sound.”

Consider coming across a new word, like reading “Brobdingnagian” for the first time in Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” The unfamiliarity requires a laborious effort to unpack the letters’ sounds into what becomes the word.

“It’s a struggle,” says McNorgan. “And though even fluent readers occasionally encounter this difficulty, the exertion required to get the word is what happens all the time for people with dyslexia.”

For the current study, McNorgan and UB graduate students Erica Edwards and Kali Burke, and Vanderbilt University collaborator James Booth used fMRI, a technology that measures and maps brain activity, to look at how the regions of the reading network connect and interact.

books
The study’s results suggest that the reading difficulty associated with dyslexia stems from a lack of coordinated processing in the four brain areas known as “the reading network.” NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.

The 24 participants, ages 8-13, completed rhyming tasks under three conditions: seeing two words; hearing two words; and hearing the first words while seeing the second. The rhyming tasks required participants to map visual representations to sounds.

As the participants completed the tasks, fMRI scans revealed what brain regions were activated and how they were communicating.

“We’re taking a brain network perspective,” says McNorgan. “We’re want to learn, not just what these brain areas are doing, but how are these areas talking to each other.”

The goal, says McNorgan, is to determine whether or not the network’s configuration is determining the degree to which dyslexic children experience reading difficulty.

“The way things are wired is going to make a big difference in how communication occurs within this network,” he says. “And why some children’s brains seem to be resistant to becoming optimally wired remains an outstanding question.”

About this neuroscience research article

Source: Bert Gambini – University at Buffalo
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Open access research for “Dyslexia on a continuum: A complex network approach” by Erica S. Edwards, Kali Burke, James R. Booth, and Chris McNorgan in PLOS ONE. Published December 17 2018.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0208923

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]University at Buffalo”Difficulties with Audiovisual Processing Contributes to Childhood Dyslexia.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 16 January 2019.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/dyslexia-audiovisual-processing-10559/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]University at Buffalo(2019, January 16). Difficulties with Audiovisual Processing Contributes to Childhood Dyslexia. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved January 16, 2019 from https://neurosciencenews.com/dyslexia-audiovisual-processing-10559/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]University at Buffalo”Difficulties with Audiovisual Processing Contributes to Childhood Dyslexia.” https://neurosciencenews.com/dyslexia-audiovisual-processing-10559/ (accessed January 16, 2019).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]


Abstract

Dyslexia on a continuum: A complex network approach

We investigated the efficacy of graph-theoretic metrics of task-related functional brain connectivity in predicting reading difficulty and explored the hypothesis that task conditions emphasizing audiovisual integration would be especially diagnostic of reading difficulty. An fMRI study was conducted in which 24 children (8 to 14 years old) who were previously diagnosed with dyslexia completed a rhyming judgment task under three presentation modality conditions. Regression analyses found that characteristic connectivity metrics of the reading network showed a presentation modality dependent relationship with reading difficulty: Children with more segregated reading networks and those that used fewer of the available connections were those with the least severe reading difficulty. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that a lack of coordinated processing between the neural regions involved in phonological and orthographic processing contributes towards reading difficulty.

Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.
Join our Newsletter
I agree to have my personal information transferred to AWeber for Neuroscience Newsletter ( more information )
Sign up to receive our recent neuroscience headlines and summaries sent to your email once a day, totally free.
We hate spam and only use your email to contact you about newsletters. You can cancel your subscription any time.