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Brain Advance Access published online on August 29, 2007
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awm193
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Impaired tuning of a fast occipito-temporal response for print in dyslexic children learning to read

Urs Maurer1,2, Silvia Brem1, Kerstin Bucher1, Felicitas Kranz1, Rosmarie Benz1, Hans-Christoph Steinhausen1 and Daniel Brandeis1,3

1Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Zurich, Switzerland, 2Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, USA and 3Center for Integrative Human Physiology, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Correspondence to: Daniel Brandeis, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Brainmapping Research, Neumunsterallee 9, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland E-mail: brandeis{at}kjpd.unizh.ch

Developmental dyslexia is defined as a disorder of learning to read. It is thus critical to examine the neural processes that impair learning to read during the early phase of reading acquisition, before compensatory mechanisms are adapted by older readers with dyslexia. Using electroencephalography-based event-related imaging, we investigated how tuning of visual activity for print advances in the same children before and after initial reading training in school. The focus was on a fast, coarse form of visual tuning for print, measured as an increase of the occipito-temporal N1 response at 150–270 ms in the event-related potential (ERP) to words compared to symbol strings. The results demonstrate that the initial development of reading skills and visual tuning for print progressed more slowly in those children who became dyslexic than in their control peers. Print-specific tuning in 2nd grade strongly distinguished dyslexic children from controls. It was maximal in the inferior occipito-temporal cortex, left-lateralized in controls, and reduced in dyslexic children. The results suggest that delayed initial visual tuning for print critically contributes to the development of dyslexia.

Key Words: dyslexia; reading disability; learning; EEG/ERPs; EEG source imaging

Abbreviations: EEG, electroencephalography; ERP, event-related potential; GFP, Global Field Power; N1, first occipito-temporally negative component of the ERP; LORETA, Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography; MANOVA, Multivariate Analysis of Variance

Received March 15, 2007. Revised June 22, 2007. Accepted July 25, 2007.


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