Brain Imaging Studies of Reading and Reading Disability

this program is presented by university of california television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest UC TV programs the work I'm going to talk about today is at Georgetown University it's highly collaborative the dyslexia work I'm going to talk about is in collaboration with my colleague Lynn flower flowers and Frank ward at Wake Forest University and I'm not going to talk about it today but we also do some collaborative work with Gallaudet University which is a university for deaf students in Washington DC and today I'm going to talk about reading and it's probably obvious to most of you but of course reading is tremendously important because it is the gateway to learning and children who learn well we read well read more often and have therefore the ability to learn more through print and it's not just reading English but of course it's access to all areas of knowledge and that's why it's so important the thing that makes reading so special is that it is a purely cultural invention and so when we think about reading we have to remember that this is this is something that's come to us very recently language has been around for hundreds of thousands of years whereas reading has just been with us for four to six thousand years as shown here as evidenced on these early images from the logographic writing system in Asia and the alphabetic writing system found just west of the Nile the early indication of written symbolic representation and so of course we don't have animal models to study reading and so when brain imaging came along of course that was a tremendous boost for understanding of the reading brain and here's just an example of what one of the very first imaging study looking at people reading inside the scanner this was pet and you can see the visual cortex lighting up of course these days we have better images many through the magnetic resonance imaging technology that we use and here's our scanner before was dropped into the Imaging Center and of course these have popped up all over the country literally falling out of the sky as this one from a crane and being put into research facilities so that we can study skills such as reading and begin to get a good understanding of the areas that are involved in the reading brain and of course what's especially important to understanding the reading brain is to be able to scan children and which is what functional magnetic resonance imaging allows us to do to non-invasively get at the neural signature for reading in children but also track it over time and scan children at a young age and try and figure out what it is that we use in our brains to become a skilled reader and what I'm going to talk about today are two kinds of MRI data there there many more but I'm going to show you studies that we've done to try and evaluate brain anatomy using MRI technology and also brain function and particularly of course brain function because we're interested in understanding how the brain is organized for reading but as you will see during my talk learning to read doesn't just change how the brain is organized for reading but it also changes the anatomy of the brain and I always tell this to teachers that I remind them that when you teach children to learn to read you are truly changing their brain and so these are the two kinds of technologies were using the thing where this research is really benefited from is that we are using imaging in the context of a very rich field people have done extensive research into reading and we have a lot of understanding of why this children succeed with reading we know for example that there are certain skills that if children have those they go on to be good readers such as the alphabetic principle and phonological awareness and I'll explain these as I go through my talk background knowledge for kalbarri having good understanding of words having many words in your vocabulary understanding of sentence structure these are all things that set up children for success for reading but we also know that the acquisition of reading changes depending differs for different children depending on certain things such as the language in which you're learning to read some languages the the mapping between sound and print is very direct so for example in German there's a very direct mapping the letters always have the same sound but of course English is a harder language in which to learn to read because we have so many exception words the orthography different writing systems if you have to think about the idea that the brain is organized for reading it is probably moonlighting somewhat it's doing a task that it wasn't directly designed to do and as we asked our children to become skilled readers in these different writing systems they probably draw on slightly different brain areas in order to become skilled at that task and we also know that other things such as social class and sex and all these things influence the rate of reading acquisition in children now reading involves certain skills we often talk about three concepts that are important for reading so I want to explain them to you now which is understanding how there are patterns in words the spelling patterns of the visual word form and that's often referred to as the orthography within words and we we map that onto the sound structure that we hear in words which is the phonology and when we read we look at the orthography we access the phonology but we also have to access the big demeaning or the semantics and of course that is the the reason for reading and so that we can access meaning and all of these are skills that we house in different parts of our brain but sometimes in similar areas of the brain and people have been studying for a long time and it's their key aspects of learning to read and even though we think of them as separate it's also known that they somewhat hang together people have studied them for example using computational models and they found that there are Network they seem to be networks that work together to bring this information about reading the sound structure the word form and its meaning to bear so that we can actually make sense of what it is that we learn that we read now as I said we know a lot about reading and a lot about reading development so for example the naree sometime ago described stages of phases of reading so when you look at young children who are beginning breeders you can see that they have certain skills that get better and better and other phases they have to go through to become a skilled reader so for example children young children kindergarteners recognize certain letters that are common in our environment like the yellow M sign for McDonald's because we have a lot of exposure to that they recognize that often or perhaps a stop sign on the street that you see a lot that you stopped at all the time so they begin to recognize certain frequent letters in their environment and they begin to understand that letters have a sound that goes with them and then as they become more skilled they understand that the principles of the coding and decoding is really sounding out words and they also begin to understand that certain letter combinations exist again and again in our language and they can read those by analogy as soon as they get a hang of understanding that they repeat in the language and so the early stages that occur in early readers and a little earlier than the children that we have been scanning but we also know that there are skills that if you have those skills you are more likely to succeed in becoming a good reader then if you don't have those skills and those skills have been described under this umbrella term of phonological processing but there there are specific skills under than a relative umbrella term that I'm going to introduce you to but the bottom line is is that there certain aspects about children's understanding sensitivity to the sound structure of our language that if they recognize that our spoken language is made up of units of sounds that then helps them later on to map those units of sounds onto their symbolic representation eye onto the written counterpart of those words and so one of the first questions we set out to do is ask the question how does reading what is the neural signature for reading in the brain of children who are typical readers and what is the relationship between the brain errors that they use for reading and the age at which they are and also the relationship with their phonological skills that we know are so important to producing a skilled reader and so before I do that I would just want to introduce you to the areas in the brain that I'm going to be talking about today and you'll get fairly used to them by the end of my talk and these are areas that we've known for some time that are involved in reading so that the errors that we focus on even though we scan the entire brain and they also map very nicely on models that have been put forward by people that can pew that talk about areas that we use for reading and and how these errors may differ and children who struggle in learning to read children with dyslexia and so the first area I just want to mention is this region here which is at the intersection of the occipital and temporal lobe it's often referred to as the visual word form area because it plays a role in recognizing words that we see very often in our environment so the words that we don't stand out like words like the and that we commonly encounter seem to be processed very rapidly by this part of the brain giving us direct access to its meaning when we come across the word that we've never seen before we have to actually sound it out and apply some correspondence rules we see engagement in the area here at the top of the temporal lobe and the inferior parietal cortex and so it's referred to as an area that's involved in phonological assembly it's putting together the sounds of that word and the same area also seems to involve with access to meaning of those words a semantic representation and then in the front of the brain and the inferior frontal gyrus there seems to be again that dual role for both phonological assembly and semantics and slightly different parts of that area but again meaning and assembly so when we study children in the scanner when they're reading we have to of course be cognizant of the fact that they are novice readers and we have to give them tasks that they can actually do in the scanner and so one way we do that is by sort of tricking the brain a little bit we're using a mechanism that's sort of interesting which is this so let me just demonstrate to you how this works I'm going to show you a sentence on the screen and I want you to look at it and tell me how many words are in the sentence but I didn't actually want you to read the sentence okay so I'm asking you don't read the sentence just tell me how many words and here you go you must have you are skilled readers and and as you read you cannot inhibit yourself from accessing the meaning it's impossible to dissociate those two things and this is actually what's behind this droop effect and this is something that scientists have used to the advantage of reading studies which is that if you show a person of word they automatically not only look at the word form but they access its phonological sound representation and its meaning like you just did even though I told you not to do that and and this is the the principle that Kathy Price developed a task on that she used and then we have used for many of the studies because we thought it was such a nice paradigm to use where we asked people to look at words inside the scan and tell us if the word they're looking at has a tool feature like the L here or not and depending on if there is one you press one button and if there isn't you press the other button and then we take those scans that we acquire when people are doing this on a different word every few seconds we show a different word and we compare it to a task where you're also determining if there's a tool feature yes or no but this time we're presenting you again with visual symbols but they have no meaning and they don't have a corresponding sound because they are pseudo fonts and what Kathy Price showed is that when you subtract the real words from the pseudo fonts even though you're not reading aloud inside this gaana you can see activity in the brain areas that we typically see during a loud reading and we don't like people reading loud in the scanner because it also induces head motion and other artifacts and so this is the task that we've used for many studies and we used it here in a case to study children studying at age six all the way to young college students at Georgetown to ask the question when they will do this task what do we see across the brain and how does it change this is the cross-sectional study it was done by my then student Peter Terkel Taub who's now at Georgetown on the faculty neurology and what we found is that the earliest readers identity they use the this region here in the superior temporal sulcus and this is an area that has neurons that code for information from both vision and addition and particularly sensitive to sensory information from more than one modality so it seems like a good choice for the reading brain to pick those areas that concurred for both the visual information that obviously we need for reading and bring it together with the auditory information and that that we see that in this children between six and nine and then when we go to slightly older children up to young adults 9 to 18 year olds you will begin to see activity here and in fear pride lobe and an inferior frontal lobe and then in our college students you see what sort of considered that know the typical neural signature for reading engaging all of these areas and then what we did next is we asked the question well how does this signal that we get in these brain areas correlate with the person's skills measured on standardized tests outside of the MRI machine and we went to three measures of phonological processing and so what we're interested here is really tapping into primarily this skill which is phonemic awareness which is a person's ability to uh nice elate and manipulate the sounds that we have in words and then there are some other skills that are somewhat related to this but but also slightly different and what's interesting about these three skills and I'm going to show you how we measure them is that they all if you give these tests and beginning readers they're all strong predictors of children's later reading outcome and they all make an independent contribution so when you combine them you can really estimate who will be a good reader down the road as opposed to who might be at risk for having a reading problem down the road so here's just one example of a test that we use there many others this is a test where you associate sounds with colored blocks that you put in front of the person whose phonemic awareness skills you're measuring and you do things like this sure if this says F and you're representing two phonemes show me if and what you're looking for is for the person to take off the first block and replace it with another block to indicate that you've just changed the first sound and measures like this are very good at predicting later reading outcome another measure that is a good predictor of later reading outcome is the this test it's called the rapid automatized naming test and it was devised by Martha denckla and reach over del and you first make sure that children or whoever you're testing they know that the letters that you have here but then you ask them to say them as fast as they can and the speed at which they do this is highly predictive of children's later reading outcome and it's also an area where just like the previous sense I showed you children with dyslexia have difficulties with and then the third test that we give is this one which is a measure of working memory this is a digit span it's a sub test from an IQ test and it's really the same thing that you do when you're trying to memorize somebody's telephone number where you somebody says - I'm going to say a number several numbers and I want you to tell them back and then at some point of the test it gets even harder where they say I'm going to tell you some numbers and I want you to say them back to me but in the reverse order so you have to put them online in your working memory and what we did is we measured this our standardized test and we measured this in our participants and then asked where do we seek positive correlations in the brain between these measures and the brain activity and so for a working memory we sit in left parietal cortex and for phonemic awareness at this at the phoneme level we see correlation in the top of the temporal area in the back and in the inferior frontal gyrus and the rapid naming is in red here we see correlations also in the inferior frontal gyrus but it behaves somewhat differently and that it correlates with errors in the right hemisphere it's very interesting because in dyslexia research northern ooh we know that these are different between children with and without a sexier but but the children who have difficulties of both rapid naming and phonemic manipulations are the children who tend to be the most severe cases of dyslexia and that's known as the double deficit group so what we shown here is that you can see brain bases for reading early on and children the errors that they use also the same areas that we know are correlated with skills that we know predict later reading outcome and so this is also a way for us to bring together clinical tests or tests that are also used in the testing environment at school with the brain imaging data as a way to fuse that because you can't do everything inside the scanner there's only so much time that you haven't set the scanner or so much time that you can ask your participants to be in the scanner so it's another way of tapping into some additional skills that you might be interested in and so what I've shown you here are results that give you a sense of what happens in children and adults and since then people of course have done many of these studies and here's a meta-analysis that was just published earlier this year from the Salzburg group showing brain activity in children and tasks that involve reading and brain activity here and blue in adults and some of the differences between them and they also again speak to these developmental changes the idea that children more than adults engage the superior proportions that and that in adults you see more activity in the frontal lobes and also in this area individual word for Mary perhaps with the idea that as you become more skilled and more automated that you rely on on very automatic recognition in this part of the visual stream and people have also done studies looking at different languages where we know that the mapping between the spoken language and print is somewhat different so this is a very interesting study that was done some time ago by Radha palace or first of all showing areas involved in reading that are common to Italian readers and and readers in English in England but also looking at differences and finding that the Italians where the mapping is much more consistent and where you can you can apply some correspondence rules quite easily because they always follow the use temporal-lobe areas up here in the superior portion of the temporal lobe whereas in English you rely heavily more heavily on the visual area the one that you're useful for recognizing the word by sight as well as some of these frontal areas so even though there are many many commonalities or people talk about Universal features of reading there are some differences depending on the kind of language that you're reading and also the orthography in which you read so here is a meta-analysis now showing you the brains at a slightly different angle this is an axial section looking at people who either read in an alphabetic language like Italian and English but now here is the same data for people who are reading in in Asian writing systems logographic languages and what people have been struck by is the use of the left hemisphere visual system in alphabetic writing systems but this becomes either bilateral or maybe even more right hemisphere when it comes to reading these characters that have very a lot of information that's visual spatial has all these strokes and and would make sense that it would maybe invoke more right hemisphere function given that the right hemisphere more assigned to spatial analysis and so again you have to just remember that and much of this we think of the brain as having to tackle this rather complex skill and deciding what resources it can use or as standard hain describes it this in his neuronal recycling hypothesis is that you take brain areas that we're doing something different but similar enough and you train them to become involved in this reading network of the brain and depending on what the demands are of the writing system in which you're learning to read they may be somewhat different even though in large part they're shared and then I just want to mention another thing that's become very interesting in the last few years which is that when you learn to read it seems that the act of doing that changes the brain quite dramatically and this became very evident in these studies that were done in Colombia comparing people who are illiterate who've never learned to read for those who used to be illiterate but then later on as adults learned to read and comparing the brain and nationally between them so this is a measure of gray gray matter volume and what you're looking at here are areas in the brain where there's more volume more brain volume in people who was adults learn to read this was done in people who were engaged in guerrilla warfare and then later on as adults learn to read and what you see is that the act of learning to read increased gray matter volume in their brains and that has very important implications when we think about reading and reading disability and here is sort of a very complicated slide but I just want to give you the gist of this this is sort of a study looking at in this case a brain function from the work of standard hain and looking at how people respond to different stimuli and using a range of participants that range all the way from being illiterate and those who were illiterate and then became literate to those who are very fluid readers and so what you see here essentially is that as your brain responds more to two words you do that obviously the more skilled you are the more literate you are but if you look at like faces those the same brain Aaron now responds to faces if you are illiterate so the idea here is that maybe areas that were engaged pre before we became skilled readers for faces now get hijacked and get reassigned to processing this kind of object class which is words because it's important to us and by doing so we are essentially rearranging the functional specialization in this case of the visual stream so let me turn to dyslexia now which has been the focus of our interest and first of all let me just tell you what dyslexia is I'm going to show you three slides with the official definition that that came out of the panel from the International dyslexia organization and it was supported by the National Institute of Health and really when we talk about dyslexia we're talking about children who from the very beginning are struggling readers and who have difficulty in reading accuracy in the accuracy of words it is the most common learning disability of all learning disabilities and we know that it's a neurobiological and origin they often have difficulties also with spelling but the real problem is decoding some countries emphasize the spelling so for example in Germany the spelling is an important emphasized when you talk about dyslexia and the idea here is that the reason they struggle to learn to read is because of their difficulties with phonological processing so even before learning to read understanding that words are made up of sounds that even though we we squeeze them with how articulate them we make them all sound like they're all connected they are actually somewhat just could they have to be disconnected for us to map them on to print and that children with dyslexia have difficulties with recognizing that and that these difficulties are really quite unexpected because they're doing so they're doing just fine in other areas of learning and cognition and then the secondary consequence of this decoding problem is that they also then often have difficulties with comprehension but their comprehension problems are really driven by their decoding problems because when you ask them to comprehend through the oral modality they don't have difficulties there and of course they also have produced reading experience and by doing that you also then reduce their background knowledge and growth of vocabulary and sight word McCaffery dyslexia is highly heritable so if you have dyslexia the chances that your child has dyslexia are about 40% so we know who is at risk for having dyslexia based on their family history and also based on how well they do on these measures of phonological processing even before they go into school it's highly prevalent the actual rate depends on how you define it it also is somewhat higher in english-speaking countries but possibly because of the mapping in English and it's and you see it more in males than you see in females we know that there's a biological basis and we've known that for some time because this is the very early work by alga libertà showing in brains of individuals who had dyslexia during their lifetime when examined at post-mortem they found these ectopia z' that are indicative of some early neuronal differences in migration that happened in utero when the brain was developing and this was very important for people to recognize that this really had a brain basis and it wasn't because the children weren't trying of were stupid or the parents were being difficult but really showing that in areas that we know that involved in language they seem to be at the microscopic level some differences and so when people started having brain imaging technology of course they looked to ask questions or what are the areas that we see that are engaged in reading and people who have no difficulties in learning to read and how do they differ in children and adults with dyslexia and largely what people have found is that areas in this occipital temporal portion and parietal temporal areas are under activated and people with dyslexia even if they are engaged in the task and you can see this summarized here this is a meta-analysis out of our lab showing that across a range of published studies if you look at where that you see the most salient findings across studies they've all down to these areas this extra straight visual area top of the temporal lobe and inferior parietal cortex and so it's really quite striking that independent of which lab or which country the work is done that you see these common findings in these meta analyses and here again is an example looking at cross linguistic studies this is again from Arado PI laser shown under activity in the occipital temporal portion here in people with dyslexia in France and in Italy and in the United Kingdom so even though they're all reading in different languages when they're engaged in reading in their language they under active 8 this part of the brain and so of course one of the important questions is what happens first of all you know can we come can people with dyslexia become more skilled readers and if they do what happens in the brain what is the neural correlate of successful reading intervention and that's a question that we asked a few years ago and we studied in a group of adults during a task this is a slightly different task we had people listening to words and taking off the first sound of that word or the first phoneme and saying it back to us and here are adults who are typical readers and when they're doing this task they largely activate the same areas that I've been showing you all along for reading in this left hemisphere reading Network and here's a group of adults with dyslexia who we know have had dyslexia since they were children doing the same task and then we have to do a direct comparison between the two and what we find is that in the adults with dyslexia we see less activity in parietal cortex for this particular task and remember this is not a task where they're reading so much but if they're hearing a word and they're manipulating the phoneme and so what we then asked in these adults is what happens if they undergo a reading intervention and they make gains in reading so the idea would be we scan them before the intervention following the intervention and then compare those two to see what changed and the expectation may be that they now engage areas that we see in typical readers and that by the time the intervention is over they look more like a non dyslexic reader but it could also be that they use other areas that help them compensate for their reading difficulties so kind of more than model that you see sometimes in stroke patients where do you see compensation and other brain areas and we did this in the context of giving an intervention to these adults we had 20 adults we used an intervention for which we could find in the peer-reviewed published literature evidence that it worked and it's a it's a combination of approaches and it's there's a lot going on in these interventions but our goal was really to see not so much which aspects of the intervention work but but could we improve on their reading and the dyslexics that we saw came from North Carolina they were soon but seen by Juneau who's a very famous clinician or was a very famous clinician in the field of dyslexia her husband was Sammy Orton who was a lead person in dyslexia and identified and recognizing the biological basis for this next year and June Orton would keep records of the children that she saw and those records were retrieved by the Wake Forest investigators in the 80s before HIPAA from Columbia University well aware where where dr. Orton had a faculty appointment and so these are adults who we know that have had lifelong reading problems and we assigned them into one of two groups one group received the intervention and the other group did not receive the intervention but they could have intervention afterwards if they wanted to and that was to have a control group and so the difference is that we're looking at are now all in comparison to the they're both dyslexic groups but only one who perceives the intervention and the very first thing that we look at is what what what happened to their skills so on again using standardized tests we ask things like well did they get better at things like phonemic awareness you're manipulating sounds within words tests like say blend now say it again without the sound and on a task like that we see marked improvement in the group of dyslexics who receive the intervention and statistically more than those that did not receive the intervention we also had them to tasks that look at symbol imagery or visual imagery or making a thing in your mind's eye the words that you're processing and and again there they made significant gains and the reason we're interested in these measures is because this is what the intervention britta targets and of course you would expect to see changes here because that's what they're doing during the intervention the real quest question is does it generalize to reading and so here are some measures of non word reading where you know you have to decode the word because it's a word that you've never seen before so the only way you can read it correctly is by sounding it out and again you can see that the dyslexic to receive the intervention made significant gains so the intervention worked and so now the question is what happened in the brain and what you're looking at here is the result from the increases following the reading intervention in the dyslexic group that received the intervention but by comparison with the dyslexic group they did not receive the intervention so it's a control design and the first thing you'll notice is that there's an increase in prior cortex the area that I showed you before that was actually under activated in the dyslexics compared to the non-dyslexics and also activity now greater in this frontal area that we know that's involved but what's somewhat striking is all this activity and the right hemisphere that really speaks to a compensating mechanism so another area that got involved to help out perhaps and these are areas that if they were on the left hemisphere would we would think about them as being involved in reading but in the group of adults a and these are people in their 40s and 50s we see them in the right hemisphere so there's a sort of a compensation model here so from this we we learned that we see increases in activity in both the left in the right hemisphere and that in adults and it turns out also in children we see these right hemisphere increases that seem to indicate that other parts of the brain can be roped into reading particularly when reading acquisition is somewhat difficult so I've shown you changes in end and brain function but we were also interested in seeing whether they were whether you can measure differences in brain structure when when people with dyslexia undergo this kind of intensive tutoring and the reason we were interested in is because people have shown in our field that in the field of cognitive neuroscience that when you train on certain skills you can actually show that not only do people get better at the task but areas of the brain change in terms of gray matter volume and this was a study that was done where college students learned to juggle balls and as they did so certain areas of cortex that are involved in visual motion processing plumped up and got bigger and then when they stopped they shrank again and so this paper received a lot of attention of course it becomes much more meaningful in the context of learning and here's now as a study by the same authors but this time looking at medical students who are studying for their medical exams and we again you see increases in brain structure brain very much with volume and this time they're actually maintaining the gray matter one which is good because these are medical students and you hope that they it sticks a little bit and we wanted to ask a similar question in our dyslexic students and so this is now a study that was done in children where we did intervention and asked do we see gray matter volume changes in our dyslexic students who are undergoing the same kind of tutoring that I just described to you earlier for the adults which is a tutoring with you know in small groups really sort of enhancing their understanding for phonemes and so on the kinds of things that people typically provide for students with dyslexia and we had a subset of children with dyslexia who we scanned and then they received a reading intervention again the tutoring after which they were scanned and then we also rescan them after the same amount of time to have a no intervention period and that sort of fit the same design as the ones that I've just shown you and that you can now see whether they maintain any gains and whether they maintain any changes in brain anatomy that may have come about by the reading intervention in the first place and so first of all let me just show you what happens to reading and these are all standardized measures of reading in the solid bars that you can see go up from before the intervention began to after the intervention was completed and all the dotted lines are measures of skills that we know that support readings things like phonemic awareness rapid naming working memory and you can also see that after the intervention was over and we saw them again for the third time they maintained all their skills so it didn't go away and of course it's reading so it's not that they stopped reading they continued to read and so they've maintained the gains and this is what we saw in four brain areas that increased in gray matter volume as a result of the intervention you can see them going up and you can see that they maintained and even continued going up even when we no longer provided the intervention and here's where these areas are they're in the left and right hippocampus and we thought this was somewhat interesting because we were actually rooting for the areas that we see and activity in during the functional tasks and and those areas that we know that are involved in phonological processing but instead what we found is areas that are involved in learning and memory and have also been shown to change and other studies that in that include skill acquisition as well as the cerebellum and the left pre kunis so what we learned from this is that not only do we see changes in brain fun and behavior and improvement in reading I showed you in the earlier study that we look at differences in brain function but here what we see in terms of structure that happens in other areas and it's sort of interesting that it's in the hippocampus which is one of the areas where people suspect there may be some generation of new tissue and that could be the reason why the hippocampus is involved and importantly these differences are maintained rather just going away so based on that it may not dawn on you that I've just shown you that when children learn to read their brain changes and when children with dyslexia and the go tutoring and make gains their brain changes and I've already pointed out to you that learning to read changes the brain and this actually now presents a little bit of a dilemma for us in research because when we look at the brains of people with dyslexia it's a little hard to know whether the differences that we see are due to their dyslexia or if they're more a reflection of the difference of their reading experience compared to the other children to which we compare them so now you have to remember that children who go to school and learn to read essentially their brains we think are changing because of that process then we take children with dyslexia who haven't enjoyed that same reading experience because they're struggling and now we're comparing them to that population and we may see differences and in fact we do here's another meta-analysis from the Salzburg group by far we richland these are areas where people most commonly report an anatomical difference the same and after me that I've been describing in grey matter volume in studies of dyslexics compared to non-dyslexics where they see less grey matter volume in these structures here in the temporal lobe but the question is is this why they struggle to learn to read or is this the consequence of their altered reading experience and so to ask that question we took a slightly different approach which is to not just compare our dyslexic children to their peers who are matched on aged but to compare them to children who are younger but reading at the same level so they're matched on reading level and that's what's demonstrated here so this is sort of the traditional design you compare your dyslexic to your non dyslexic children they're matched on aged but now you take younger children who are equated to the dyslexic group on their reading level even though they are they are actually older and when we compare our children with dyslexia to their chronological age matched comparison group we find differences in gray metal volume in the right hemisphere also but also in these left hemisphere regions that have previously been reported but when we repeat it and the children who are younger and matched on reading level we can't reproduce the result it goes away only one finding is maintained and that's in this right hemisphere so so that really does suggest that maybe part of what we're seeing here has to do with the reading experience itself rather than the dyslexia and of course that's going to be very important in terms of our understanding of the etiology in dyslexia and the brain mechanisms if we can't reproduce it in these reading level match designs and of course we need longitudinal studies to really be certain also what's going on but from this we deduced that we have to be some of our cautious about interpreting these differences in gray matter volume and also we are somewhat struck by this right hemisphere difference which is the only one that seems to maintain across the two experiments so we have to think about not only what do we because the brain bring to the process of reading to become a skilled reader but the experience of engaging with books and texts on on a regular basis how does that change the brain so we have really have to think of it as a as a two-way street and we know that because we know as I showed you early on that as you become more skilled as a reader the areas that you use increase and change and since we're sort of on the topic of areas of study that you know make us pause a little bit about our understanding of dyslexia and how to interpret the findings I wanted to do society and I know people here are very interested in this is the role of sex and I told you that dyslexia is is more commonly found in males than it is in females but in reality most of the work has also been done on males and we don't know very much about females and so here's another meta-analysis the Sun vine group looking at nine studies that were done in and and it published looking at published studies in dyslexia and seeing what are the areas that come up again and again is being different I'm showing you the same areas as I showed you in the previous study plus some additional ones but these are nine studies but when you look at the studies that that fed into this meta-analysis the dyslexics are only sixteen percent of them are females the majority of my mouse because the original studies are all done in all-male samples or male dominated samples and so what does that mean for for females with dyslexia so my graduate student Tonya Evans looked into this and I don't expect you to be able to read this but the point I really just want to make here is that we studied men with dyslexia and compared them to men who don't have dyslexia and women with dyslexia and compared them to only women in dyslexia and that hadn't actually been done before because nobody has just looked at females and then we did the same in a group of children again just boys wear them without dyslexia and girls within without dyslexia and what we found is summarized here in that and what we found is that in boys for example and then we see differences in the temporal lobe like I described to you before in the boys we see differences in left hemisphere angular gyrus supramarginal gyrus but when it comes to the women the differences were in the right hemisphere they were up they were around the central sulcus and the girls too and the girls also we saw differences in earlier visual system and so they didn't don't map on to the literature at all and so I think it's really critical that we start studying females separately when it comes to dyslexia and probably other disorders and we were so struck by this finding that was published by Anne Simon baron-cohen and his colleagues showing the relationship between testosterone levels in utero on later gray matter volume and showing that there are negative correlations in these temporal lobe areas where we see differences in dyslexia and males and positive correlations in these other areas so the idea that the early uterine environment and these hormones I play an important role in how the brain develops and we already know that there are very striking differences between men and women when it comes to brain structure people have studied that quite extensively and we also know that when it comes to language function also we see some differences in brain how the brain is organized for language times particularly tasks that are critical to reading like phonological processing has been shown in one study to be represented by laterally in women but unilaterally and then and so clearly there are differences to begin with and in few if you on top of that put dyslexia you're likely to see some sex specific differences and of course it's also very interesting when you contemplate this in the context of what we know about the the role of sex hormones in neural injury and and how it may be play a different role and women and also in the outcome of dyslexia so really my point is is to say I think people are beginning to recognize now that we really have to study females with dyslexia separately and there are two other papers that just came out recently also again showing that some of the differences that you see in the dyslexic brains of males with dyslexia are not the same as what you see in females so I urge you to you know pull your data apart so from my talk now you've sort of gotten the sense of the sort of interest in dyslexia on phonological processing people refer to the phonological deficit hypothesis hero theory that there are differences in the left hemisphere that we think that they impact phonological processing and that they are the reason why children with dyslexia struggle to learn to read this is really one of the most prevalent theories and and and when children need help for reading people to try and address their phonological deficits primarily but I should let you know that there there are other manifestations of dyslexia and there are other theories about what may be the cause of dyslexia and another one is this one which is this magnocellular deficit hypothesis which spans across the auditory system and the visual system as well as the motor system and the idea here is it some impairments in these systems that result in a number of behavioral manifestations one for example difficulties in order to processing and that these directly related to these phonological processing problems that children with dyslexia have so a kind of a low-level etiology that then percolates up to these phonological problems that then impact the reading problem as part of this kind of a larger magnocellular deficit hypothesis there's been some work looking at the visual system and I want to use that as an example to show you how I think brain imaging can help in clearing up some of these really what our competing theories about the etiology of dyslexia so I'm now going to orient you to the visual system and the magnocellular theory is based on observations in behavior of children when they have to process visual tasks and the differences that you see in children with dyslexia seem to be on visual tasks that are thought to be processed by what's called the magnocellular system which is a division of the visual system that begins actually as early as at the eye board the retinal ganglion cells but is noticeable in the thalamus but then is projected to different streams with the magnocellular system often being sort of thought of as the dorsal stream and as opposed to the ventral stream which is more interested in object processing the dorsal stream is engaged in visual motion perception area v5m teeth it's here helps us identify where things are moving in space and and generally this part of the brain is sort of as a spatial and spatial orient orienting of the brain and so what was interesting is that many years ago there were studies using visual psychophysics showing that there are differences in children with dyslexia when it comes to processing stimuli of low spatial and high temporal frequency which are attributes that are thought to be observed by the magnocellular visual system and later people built on this by looking at visual motion detection because that's thought to be part of the cellular stream and is showing very simply that when you ask children to look at dots and ask them to see what direction they're moving in children with dyslexia need to have more dots moving in that direction before they can detect what the direction is compared to children who don't have dyslexia and it seemed to fit quite well with other work so for example we published some findings showing that if you put people into the scanner and they process motion you see activity in this part of the brain this is called v5m T it's sort of a great-sized area that helps us process visual motion and in the end the listen in the dyslexics we did not see activity in this part of the brain so really the sort of behavioral work seemed to have a neurological basis in the functional studies and it was very specific to the stimuli because we didn't see it for example in response to patterns where the responses were very similar between our dyslexic and non-dyslexic sample and it fit very nicely with anatomical work that again was done in postmortem by the by the group in Boston showing that if you look at the thalamus and you look at the nerve cells and the magnocellular layers you see a difference in between the dyslexic and the non-dyslexic tissue but you don't when you look at other parts of the same structure so it all seemed to sort of fit the only thing that's problematic is in part to understand how does this impact reading how does the visual motion system or the system that deals with these finds visual attributes how does it impact reading and so it's as I mentioned it's a somewhat controversial controversial theory some people saying you know it's just it doesn't exist it's not the cause of the reading problem others have argued that it really does contribute to reading problems because it's involved in eye movement and accurate eye movement is important and accurately but seeing the letters and the words that you see and others have suggested that maybe it's an epiphenomena of dyslexia that it coexists perhaps because whatever changes in the brains of people with dyslexia leads to secondary changes in the visual system and then manifest as things that we that we can see and test in the laboratory but how they actually impair reading isn't clear more likely it's the phonological problem that impairs reading but we measure these in the laboratory and what we are now arguing is that perhaps what we're seeing is really a consequence of not having the same reading experience with if you have dyslexia compared to the peers by which you can compare you them to and so just to make that point what I'm showing you here is here's the activity in this arabi 5mt and this is in a group of typical readers and the amount of signal that you see when they're looking at dots that are moving and detecting the direction the motor signal that you see here is directly correlated with their performance on reading on a standardized score scale which is sort of surprising I mean why would this part of the brain be related to your reading ability and this is for real word reading and and we see it in both and this is for non word reading and we see it both on the left and right hemisphere and it's this sort of a finding that's been so compelling to say look there's a there's a relationship between these two but of course the correlation doesn't mean causation and so to get at the issue of causation we again went to this idea of a reading level match design where as proposed by Osho Goswami you have to show that the deficit is not just there in children with dyslexia when compared to their chronological age match peers but also in children who are younger but at the same level of reading and so that's that's exactly what we did just like we did before but this time we did it in the context of looking at activity in this area v5 MT the social motion area that's here at the back of the brain and showing that in both the left and the right side of the brain when we compared dyslexic and non-dyslexic smashed on age we see these differences just like we had in the adults but now when we instead compare the dyslexics with children who are younger and reading at the same level the difference disappears so that really gives you the sense that maybe it's not the cause but it's it follows not riling to read quite as much and so we then followed this with another study which is we looked at what happens following an intervention and typically in studies the reason why the sort of a phonological deficit hypothesis is well accepted is because not only do you see the differences in the children with dyslexia and not only do you see that in typical children phonological skills particulate a reading outcome but when you provide a phonological intervention you often see gains in reading and they generalize to reading to society before now in this case we didn't do an intervention on visual motion perception we did an intervention on phonological processing and we asked what happens in this area in the visual system following the intervention and again I'm showing you here activity from both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere and this is a change score again from comparing before the intervention with after the intervention and so what you see here is that in our children with dyslexia there was a significant increase in the signal in response to visual motion perception in the right hemispheric increase was also there but not statistically significant in the left hemisphere so as they and the one intervention and as they're reading improved their visual motion set system went up a notch and it's specific because when at a time when they received either no intervention or a math intervention which was sort of our control we didn't see any such changes so it's not because they were scanned twice or something else but under very controlled circumstances you see this this change so what that really tells you is yes there is a relationship between visual motion perception or in this case a relationship with the activity and the brain area that we know substantial motion perception and reading but when you look at the reading level match design it's suggest that it doesn't hold up when you look at children who are matched on reading and also when the dyslexic children becomes more skilled at reading we see this increase and actually there is behavioral work that's that's consistent with this and has people thinking that perhaps learning to read mobilizes some of these areas in the visual system and it's also been shown that people who are illiterate do process visual information somewhat differently from those who are illiterate so again it's this idea of what happens when we learn to read that changes the brain in ways perhaps much more far-fetched and then then one might imagine so I just want to in the last few minutes turn to a slightly different area that we started to come interested in but again it goes back to why the phonological problems and the language problems in dyslexia are so interesting and that is the area of arithmetic because arithmetic like reading is something that the children learn in school and again there's this idea of what are the brain areas that we use to do arithmetic and again in our culture being good at math is really very important just like it's very important to become good at reading now many of you know that there is what's called high comorbidity between dyslexia and dyscalculia so you see math difficulties in children with dyslexia more often than you see in non dyslexic children suggesting that perhaps they hang together and it's been suggested that the same phonological awareness difficulties that hamper with children's reading problems and dyslexia may also be important to some but not all arithmetic problems and it's the kind of arithmetic that involves retrieving things from memory the kind of disease left hemisphere retrieval mechanisms that we use for doing small number addition and multiplication so when you add numbers or multiply small numbers you do it by retrieving it from from memory and it's thought that maybe your phonological processing is important for that and people have also shown in neuroimaging as in this study by Prado and booth and is that when you do this kind of retrieval based arithmetic you engage areas in the left hemisphere in the same regions that are active when you're doing a phonological task and so here's some evidence for this correlation between phonological awareness this is a measure of Furnham elisions so deleting sounds within words and this kind of retrieval based arithmetic so for example doing four plus five equals nine if you do a a procedural kind of arithmetic such as subtraction you don't see this relationship with phonological awareness it's very specific for this kind of retrieval based arithmetic and so we ask the question well what does that mean for children who have dyslexia even though they don't have math this difficulty is certainly not on standardized tests of math and not enough that they meet the clinical criteria so I'm not going to go through the details of the slide but whatever I just want to show you that these are children with dyslexia identified based on their reading difficulties compared to children who don't have dyslexia and in fact on standardized tests of calculation do fairly well and and I actually match to our sample of of controls but these measures don't pull apart the sort of fine level that I just described in terms of looking at asks that involve retrieval based arithmetic like addition and multiplication versus subtraction and so what we did here is we essentially had our children perform these kinds of small number arithmetic tasks that we think tap into retrieval based arithmetic and then we also had them perform these more procedural based operations that are thought to be more involving of the right hemisphere as opposed to the left hemisphere and we scan the children with and without deceit what we found is that even though the children with dyslexia do not have a math disability based on sort of standard identification we see under activity in the children with dyslexia when they're doing these math tasks in the left hemisphere this and the left super marginal drivers so in the same area that we know that's involved in reading and phonological manipulation when you look at the both these kinds of arithmetic tasks you see under activity in the children with dyslexia compared to the non-dyslexic controls and then what's interesting is that we see that in the right hemisphere there are also some differences so typical readers use the right hemisphere for this task that involves subtraction so I think of subtraction is the right hemisphere task but they wouldn't engage it so much for addition because that's more a left hemisphere task but the children with dyslexia don't show this dissociation they are trying to use the right hemisphere for the addition task which is not the right strategy but at the same time they're not able to access the right hemisphere as effectively for doing the subtraction task the way the typical children do and this fits very very well with the behavioral data that is shown these differences in these different kinds of tasks again really making the point that even though dyslexia by definition is a reading problem it's probably much more than that because some of the same underlying difficulties that contribute to their reading problems also subtly in a very subtle way contribute to some of their math problems and it's sort of interesting to use brain imaging to show that they really actually are in the same areas of the brain whether you are doing a phonological task or a reading task or actually even a as I've shown you here an arithmetic task so let me just summarize what I've told you in the last hour which is that we know we in others many others now have utilized brain imaging as a way to understand how the brain is organized for reading what are the earliest areas that become engaged and and we know that of course there are differences between skilled and novice readers and we also know that there are differences between children who are struggling readers because of their dyslexia and adults also know that they very reliably are in these areas that I've shown you in left parietal temporal and occipital temple as well as sort of other areas that I've shown you in these slides but mainly in these areas in the left hemisphere and that when reading success reading intervention is successful and they are able to make substantial gains in reading we see changes in both brain activity and in brain anatomy they don't necessarily co-localize to the same brain areas and I think that's very indicative perhaps of us being able to understand what happens during these interventions why these areas and and what is what is the mechanism and I think I've also shown you that we're beginning to become that more cautious in terms of how we interpret these brain images because when we see differences in the brains of people with and without disabilities is due to their dyslexia to begin with versus their very different experience they've had particularly for adults who have have a lifelong experience that is quite different from those who don't have dyslexia and that there of course many things that we have to take into consideration but particularly sex because it may be that the brain based model for dyslexia and females may turn out to be somewhat different than it is in males and I just want to thank my collaborators who've done this work and and I want to thank you for your attention and again for having me here and you raise this issue that there's some overlap really fundamentally between the experience and difficulties in the reading and math so I was wondering if you intervene with one do you show improvement in the other area whether it be family and/or brain functional yeah I think that's a good question and actually maybe we'll have me back in a few years because we are going to start studying exactly that question going forward you know it's sort of very interesting that within arithmetic there is this sort of specificity for some tasks to one hemant to some brain areas and others other tasks for others and so what we're trying to do in the next few years for the new grant that we're getting from NIH is to ask the question because people have argued about whether the reason you see dyslexia and dyscalculia in the same children's because they have some common underlying cognitive shared difficulties or if they're separate and it's just the two of them coming together and there's some there's some discussion about that but what we're trying to do is to do exactly what you're asking which is to say when you introduce a reading intervention that that increases your phonological awareness skills shouldn't you then benefit from that in this particular aspect of arithmetic processing and we don't know yet because nobody's actually done that yet and and the real problem is is really sort of a simple one which is when you look at these standardized tests for for math as I mentioned earlier they don't pull them apart in that way so so people have done work likely infused and people like that in Texas where they come up with new tests that look at these constructs very separately whereas they're all sort of merged in these standardized tests that we use and that's part of the reason we don't know so we have measures of of math performance and reading performance actually before before both math and reading intervention but we don't know we can't tell if they influenced math a differential way the way I just described I had a question regarding your research that showed that there's increased brain activity and gray matter volume with successful reading intervention is that correlated with the amount of improvement so in other words if children improve a lot with reading intervention they have more increased great matter volume compared to if they make a modest improvement yes that's a very good question in fact we funded the same and I didn't show you the slide but in the in the study we looked at exactly that we said you know is there if you look at the amount of change you know the degree of benefit from the intervention and the amount of brain volume is their direct relationship and we did find it again not in the areas that we expected because we really thought we would see these changes in these classical breeding areas we saw it in areas such as the cerebellum which actually there are a lot of people are very interested in the role of the cell of the cerebellum and in reading you know it's this structure at the back of the brain where we did see that the kind of correlation that you just described so yes it's there did it answer our question no it's sort of open new questions which is why why and those those brain areas and this question might not be very interesting but um hyperlexia you know we see a lot of children here who have the ability to recognize the alphabet so early in life even before they can talk except for to label it do you have thoughts about that I do and you know I've been regretting all day that I didn't include that in my talk because we did have as I discuss with with students and postdocs and some faculty here today we had we did a case report on hyperlexia and it's a single case but it's very striking for the reasons that you just described which is that these children are so striking and and really they they really go sort of against what we think about and everything that I've just told you which is to become a skilled reader you have to good have good oral language skills and you have to have good instructions and it's a task that's not doesn't come to us naturally yet here you have these children who out of the blue and the presence of delayed language acquire spontaneously it seems very good decoding skills and so we did do a study on a child who we scanned when he was 10 years old who has who's on the or has a diagnosis of PT d non Nos and he was a precocious reader the first spoken words he had when he was three and a half but his mother had noticed long before then that he was reading because she would read him at nighttime and she would put her finger under the words that she was reading and he would move them when he saw that she was not on the right word so she knew he was reading long before he was talking and so we asked exactly the question that I'm sure that you're asking which is which brain areas does he use for reading and we did the same experimental design where we compared him to children that were matched to him on chronological age but of course he's now doing the reading his reading is at the other extreme which is that he's reading while above them and so we also compared him to a group of children who are 15 years of age even though he was 10 to match on his reading ability which was you know around 5 or 6 years ahead of his age and what we found is that he literally showed more activity in both those comparisons in the left hemisphere in the same sort of Sapir temple areas and in fair frontal areas that I showed you that people have been focusing on in dyslexia so it's almost like these areas are sort of like a dial that they're under activated in dyslexia over activated in Haifa Lexia now this is a single case report and I think it's still the only study and we need more studies of these children because they're very interesting because in the context of struggling readers you want to know how are these children doing this and which other what other brain areas are available to them and when we did this study we did it in the context of asking is it a truly a left hemisphere advantage versus a right hemisphere advantage for some of the thinking about hyperlexia had been that these are children with heightened kind of visual memory skills and that they are recognizing the words but they're sort of processing them as objects and we really had more evidence for the first which is that they that in this case he was using left hemisphere regions and this particular child was also very good at phonological awareness skills but of course as you know they're not all the same and so we really need some more studies looking at that population um when it comes to attention issues for me it's and for parents I counsel it seems like another chicken-and-egg for in some people's mind whether the attention issue might be causing difficulties in reading or the reading difficulty is causing an attention deficit because they're not as interested can you speak to that issue yes so you may have noticed I didn't mention ADHD or attention at all and but what we've done in our studies varies a little bit so for some of our studies we don't include children who have ADHD because you know we worry that that if we want to since we have small samples we want to keep the sample as homogeneous as possible for some sense we haven't done them and we have included them and to some degree if we say well you know the areas that have implicated in ADHD don't really co-localize to the areas that we're interested in reading but your point is it was a really good one which is this problem that I think when you you have a child who may look like they're not paying attention but it's really because they're bored because all their peers are reading and they can't participate in that process so they start thinking of other things to do to entertain themselves and they look like they have an attention problems and and vice versa it requires I think a careful clinician to to disambiguate those two so that you come up with the right treatment plan because as you heard the treatment plan in dyslexia is very much a one that involves tutoring very making it very explicit you know it involves teaching the same kinds of skills that you teach all children to learn to read but it's really the intensity in the repetition and and making it very very explicit that is important and doing it in a smaller group you know one-on-one or small groups and with many examples and you know I think in the field people also like to combine it with the kind of a person I showed you which involves visual imagery but also involves multi-sensory interventions of teaching phonemes and not just through audition but also the motor system and you know all those kinds of approaches and that's of course very different from when you're treating a child with ADHD where of course you also have behavior by those of pharmacological interventions so so you really need a good clinician to to pull those two apart now of course you may have both and the same child in which case you have to do both and so I'm not sure if your question is leading to this idea of could brain imaging you know help pull those apart and I think a lot of people are very interested in whether we can use these brain scans perhaps as a better way of identifying you know what actually is going on with the child but as you saw all the scans that we do are based on groups and so everything that we do is based on group data interpretation are there are efforts on the way to try and use individual scans and I did tell you even though I didn't show you the data I told you that we had a case report on this child with hyperlexia but you know that to the degree that people are comfortable making a diagnosis on a single person's brain scan we're just not quite there yet but that may change and hopefully it will change and that's perhaps where you know that kind of data could be could be put together with a careful behavioral assessment but but it's really critical I think to tell this to a part because you can lose so much time in the meantime but again I think you know if you if you look at these phonological awareness skills and you look at them early on you you and you take the history into account it you should be able to distinguish them gonorrhea is a fascinating story you presented about the grey matter volumes increasing with your fMRI imaging after a reading intervention so what do you think that increased volume represents is that more synapses or more larger neurons more neurons extracellular fluid astrocytes any ideas so the short answer is I don't know and notice anybody else and there's a lot of they've been a lot of discussions about this and you know I'll be very honest with you there are some scientists who really worry about these kinds of findings in fact there some who are concerned that it may be more to do that that what we're seeing here are changes that are somewhat a side-effect of the technology and the analysis of the data and so that's one extreme that the people that are concerned that when you scan people twice and you see a difference it may be a kind of law of a methodological issue but I think in areas where you have reasons to believe there could be such a biological change there is more confidence and the hippocampus is one of those areas because you know there is this is an area that's involved in neurogenesis and so it actually sort of makes sense biologically but nobody knows what these changes are and every paper that looks at changes in gray matter volume over time or even looking at people with particular skills you know they've been these studies looking at people who by profession do certain things that create larger brain areas because they're musicians or taxi drivers or so on every paper at the end of the discussion you will find the standard text saying you know what what the origin of this difference is we just don't know it's something that that is addressable I mean you can do these studies and animals and and and you can get to the bottom of this but nobody really knows what it is earlier I read about a study in which it indicated that the people in countries that are using a visual system for reading like in the Asian languages that they have very few dyslexics because they're able to access the information but through the phonological system because there is a part of the characters that are telling you a phoneme as well as a part that is telling you an actual word so they can utilize both parts of the brain and so it kind of looked like that would make sense according to your graphing because it showed that there was a lot of lit up in both sides of the brain when you were showing that part I'm wondering then if it doesn't predispose those children also for learning arithmetic because they would already be utilizing both sides of the brain for for reading and so therefore it would also assist them with mathematics yeah I think that's a really interesting question and and there is some work to address exactly what you're asking so people have done studies looking at dyslexia in China and the first study showed that the areas that are different between children with and without the sexy and China are not exactly the same areas that have been shown in alphabetic writing systems and the idea here is this idea that exactly what you alluded to which is when you when you read in a pictorial logographic writing system like that you may use different brain areas and so the finding there was that there were actually it wasn't a direct comparison between alphabetic readers and logographic readers but it was just showing the differences in the Chinese children and then you know by comparison with the published literature arguing that the errors are different and the areas that have been implicated in reading in Chinese this particular an error in the front of the brain in problem zero nine that has been of interest because it seems to pop up in studies of reading in Chinese but not so much in reading in alphabetic languages and it's an area that could be involved in it's not quite clear if it's an area that brings together sort of semantics and phonology or if it's an area that's involved in the motor program that children would use to produce that Chinese character because children in China you know spend a lot of time copying these characters when they're learning to read so they were getting some into another part of the brain and it's a very strong predictor in China and China is how good you are copying Chinese characters is a strong predictor of later reading outcome and so that studies seems to suggest this idea that dyslexia may manifest somewhat differently which sort of makes sense and would also be important for intervention because the kind of intervention that is practiced here may not be what's needed for children in China and actually the same is true in even in other languages and within the alphabetic system but since then others have done studies and there was a study by kathy prices group actually directly comparing children with and without as Lexia in alphabetic and logographic writing systems and not finding these kinds of differences so I don't have a really good answer for you other than to say and people are looking at it and the jury's out and it's exactly for the reasons that you just sort of summarized which has to do with what errors do you use for reading and then how does that also impact other skills you mentioned arithmetic and people you know had these case reports also for children who have dyslexia in one language but not on the other there was a famous case report showing of a boy who had dyslexia in English but not in Japanese and again it speaks to the role of the writing system so it's it still needs some more studies I think to to fully know the uc-davis mind Institute was created in 1998 with a promise to find cures for neurodevelopmental disorders every day our physicians and researchers come closer to fulfilling that promise their groundbreaking research on autism fragile X syndrome chromosome 22 q1 1.2 deletion syndrome ADHD and other brain disorders are helping children achieve 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Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

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Keywords: dyslexia, learning disability, Guinevere F. Eden

Id: -aRfWcfCYKM

Length: 79min 10sec (4750 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2015

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Which parts of the brain are activated during reading? How does this differ for children, and children with learning disabilities? Are there differences in brain activity for readers of alphabetic languages compared to readers pf logographic languages?

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Guinevere F. Eden, of Georgetown University Medical Center, showcases the brain scans of a variety of readers, using them to investigate brain structure, brain development, and abnormal brain development in children and adults with reading disabilities.