Poster C82, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 10:45 am – 12:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Universal neural anomalies in Chinese and French dyslexic children
Xiaoxia Feng1, Irene Altarelli2, Le Li1, Guosheng Ding1, Franck Ramus3, Hua Shu1, Karla Monzalvo2, Stanislas Dehaene2,4, Xiangzhi Meng5,6, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz2;1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, 2Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA DRF/I2BM, INSERM, NeuroSpin Center, Université Paris-Sud, Université ParisSaclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, 3Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, CNRS, EHESS), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France, 4Collège de France, Paris, 5School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, 6PekingU-PolyU Center for Child Development and Learning, Peking University
To investigate whether the neural anomalies underlying dyslexia are universal across languages or influenced by the writing system, we tested Chinese and French dyslexics and controls in a cross-cultural experimental fMRI paradigm. We compared 10-year old children brain activity to words, faces and houses while they were asked to detect a rarely presented star. As previously reported in alphabetic writing, we observed a correlation between reading scores and activation to words in several key regions of the reading circuit, e.g. left fusiform gyrus, superior temporal gyrus/sulcus, precentral and middle frontal gyrus. Analyses based on ROIs reported in the literature as sensitive to dyslexia revealed main effects of dyslexia with no interaction with the children native language, suggesting a cross-cultural invariance in the neural anomalies underlying dyslexia. Multivariate pattern-information analysis confirmed the impaired representation in the left fusiform gyrus in dyslexics, implying that anomaly in this region is a most robust correlate of dyslexia in different languages. However, impaired representation in the posterior superior temporal gyrus was only found in French dyslexics. This finding may reflect more severe phonological deficits in alphabetic dyslexia or a culturally-modulated compensatory strategy of Chinese dyslexia in the posterior superior temporal gyrus in visual word recognition. The current study revealed universal neural anomalies of dyslexia in different writing systems.
Themes: Reading, Disorders: Developmental
Method: Functional Imaging