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Abstract
The purpose of the study was to identify spatiotemporal brain activation pro®les associated with phonological decod-
ing in dyslexic children using magnetic source imaging. For this purpose maps of regional cerebral activation were
obtained from eleven children diagnosed with dyslexia and ten children without reading problems during engagement
in a pseudoword rhyme-matching task. All dyslexic children showed aberrant activation maps consisting of reduced
activity in temporoparietal areas in the left hemisphere (including the posterior part of the superior temporal, angular
and supramarginal gyri) and increased activity in the right homotopic region. In contrast, the two groups of children did
not differ in the degree of activity in basal temporal areas that typically precedes temporoparietal activation. This is the
®rst study to demonstrate the existence of distinct activation pro®les associated with phonological decoding in indivi-
dual dyslexic children. q 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.
Keywords: Functional imaging; Magnetic source imaging; Magnetoencephalography; Dyslexia; Reading; Phonological decoding;
Temporal lobe
There are many proposals regarding the nature of de®cits electrical currents in large neuronal aggregates using
underlying developmental reading disorder (dyslexia) magnetic source imaging (MSI, also known as magnetoen-
[4,5,8,23±25]. Regardless of the nature of this de®cit, it cephalography [12]). Brain areas that have been shown to
remains an indisputable fact that phonological decoding display reduced engagement in a variety of reading tasks in
problems are perhaps the most ubiquitous signs of dyslexia dyslexics are those located in the vicinity of the temporo-
[6,23,25]. The preferred approach for investigating directly parietal junction and typically include the posterior part of
phonological decoding skills is to examine reading perfor- the superior and middle temporal gyri, the angular, and
mance of pronounceable non-words (pseudowords). supramarginal gyri predominantly in the left hemisphere
Further, investigating brain activation pro®les associated [14,15,18]. Unfortunately, functional brain imaging meth-
with reading and phonological decoding, in particular, is ods that rely on measures of blood ¯ow/metabolism are
expected to help clarify the neurophysiological substrate largely capable of providing pro®les of relative activation
of dyslexia. Such pro®les can be obtained indirectly in the that are meaningful primarily on a group basis. On the other
form of regionally elevated levels of blood ¯ow or metabo- hand, MSI can provide detailed information regarding the
lism using positron emission tomography or functional temporal course as well as the spatial extent of task-related
magnetic resonance imaging [4,12±14,18], or more directly regional activation. Moreover, the sensitivity of this method
in the form of regionally elevated levels of intracellular for identifying areas involved in language-speci®c
processes has been established in a series of studies
* Corresponding author. Tel.: 11-713-500-6128; fax: 11-713- [11,19,22]. Unlike other functional imaging techniques,
500-7787. the validity of MSI-derived maps has been corroborated
E-mail address: asimos@heart.med.uth.tme.edu by the results of standard invasive mapping procedures
(P.G. Simos).
0304-3940/00/$ - see front matter q 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.
PII: S03 04 - 394 0( 0 0) 01 32 2- 7
62 P.G. Simos et al. / Neuroscience Letters 290 (2000) 61±65
such as the Wada procedure [2,11]. In addition, temporal discourage performing comparisons on the basis of ortho-
lobe areas shown by MSI to be active during word recogni- graphic information. Event-related magnetic ®elds (ERFs)
tion tasks were found to be associated with transient recep- were recorded to the ®rst stimulus of each pair, to ensure
tive language de®cits when stimulated electrically in that the brain activity recorded corresponded to phonologi-
patients undergoing awake craniotomies for resection of cal decoding operations and did not re¯ect the additional
tumors or epileptogenic tissue [11,20,22]. cognitive operations that matching of the stimuli entails.
It should also be noted that most existing functional The responding hand was counterbalanced across children.
imaging studies on dyslexia have examined adults with MSI data collection and analysis methods developed and
developmental reading disability. However, there is used in our laboratory have been described in detail else-
evidence that dyslexics may develop alternative reading where [11]. Brie¯y, recordings were made in a magnetically
strategies in order to compensate for their poor phonological shielded room with a whole-head neuromagnetometer
decoding skill [10]. Little is known at present of how this (Biomagnetic Technologies). The intracranial generators
compensation may affect brain activation pro®les of adult of the observed ERFs were modeled as single equivalent
dyslexics, creating the need for studies of younger indivi- current dipoles (ECDs) that were ®tted at successive 4 ms
duals with reading problems. intervals using the non-linear Levenberg±Marquardt algo-
Recently, MSI was used to obtain direct measures of rithm [16]. Although a variety of source modeling
regional cerebral engagement during reading from children approaches have been proposed by different investigators
diagnosed with dyslexia [21]. In that study ten dyslexic and [9,17] we decided to use a single-ECD source model that
eight non-dyslexic children were tested on a visual and an is part of the BTi software. Alternative algorithms hold
auditory version of a word recognition task. The most nota- many promises as tools for magnetic source localization.
ble ®nding was that, in every case, temporoparietal areas of However, they have not yet been validated against invasive
the left hemisphere (including the posterior third of the localization procedures. In contrast, there is currently a
superior and middle temporal gyri, the angular and supra- wealth of data testifying to the validity of the single-ECD
marginal gyri) failed to become engaged during reading in model for reliably localizing and lateralizing neurophysio-
children with dyslexia, whereas homologous areas in the logical activity associated with language functions
right hemisphere showed strong activation. Non-impaired [2,11,20,22]. On the basis of this evidence, the singe-ECD
readers showed the opposite pattern of strong left hemi- source model is part of the standard analysis protocol in
sphere activation coupled with signi®cantly weaker right essentially all clinical applications of magnetoencephalo-
hemisphere activation. Although a distinct activation pro®le graphy. For a given point in time, the ECD dipole ®tting
characterized all the dyslexic children in that study, it was algorithm was applied to the magnetic ¯ux measurements
unclear whether the pro®le was speci®c to phonological obtained from a group of 34±38 magnetometers, always
decoding or re¯ected a variety of other linguistic operations, including both magnetic ¯ux extrema. ECD computation
such as orthographic and semantic analysis of printed words was restricted to those latency periods during which a single
and memory that are also involved in word recognition. The pair of magnetic ¯ux extrema dominated the left and/or the
present study was designed to examine spatiotemporal acti- right half of the head surface. ECD solutions were consid-
vation pro®les in individual dyslexic children and age- ered as satisfactory upon meeting two criteria: (1) a correla-
matched non-impaired readers associated speci®cally with tion coef®cient of at least 0.90 between the observed and the
phonological decoding in the context of a pseudoword `best' predicted magnetic ®eld distribution, and (2) a 95%
rhyme-matching task [3]. con®dence volume of 3 cm 3 or smaller. Only ECDs
Eleven children (seven males, age range 10±17 years) computed during the `late' portion of ERFs to the printed
who presented with mild to severe reading dif®culties and pseudowords were considered in the analyses. Previous
ten non-impaired readers (seven males, age range 8±16 studies have shown that these activity sources originate in
years) were examined. All dyslexic children showed severe association cortices specialized for the analysis of linguistic
impairment in phonological decoding skills (scoring under stimuli [1,11,22]. Early ERF components (i.e. those
the 20th percentile on the Word Attack subtest of the WJ-R recorded up to approximately 150 ms after stimulus onset)
Battery [26] as compared to scores .80th percentile on this originate in modality-speci®c (in this case visual) cortex and
test for each of the non-dyslexic children. All subjects had probably re¯ect early sensory analysis of the stimuli. The
IQ scores (WISC III-R composite scores) of 85 or above, procedure for precise coregistration of ECD coordinates on
were right-handed with English as their primary language, structural, T1-weighted, MRI scans (TR 13.6 ms,
and had no history of hearing de®cit, neurological injury or TE 4.8 ms, recording matrix 256 £ 256 pixels, 1 excita-
disease, or visual impairment. tion, 240 mm ®eld of view and 1.4 mm slice thickness) has
Each child was tested on a pseudoword rhyme-matching been described in detail elsewhere [19,27].
tasks during which they were presented with two pseudo- As expected, performance on the task was signi®cantly
words (sequentially) and asked to decide whether they higher for the non-dyslexic group (79.2 vs. 67.4% correct,
rhymed or not. Stimuli were 4±5 letters long and were P , 0:05). The number of reliably localized activity
always orthographically dissimilar (e.g., kume- noom) to sources in temporoparietal (TMP) and basal temporal
P.G. Simos et al. / Neuroscience Letters 290 (2000) 61±65 63
by left TMP cortices in children with dyslexia. These opera- Wilmore, L.J., Wheless, J.W., Constantinou, J.C., Gormley,
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