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Experimental induction of reading difficulties in normal readers provides novel insights into the neurofunctional mechanisms of visual word recognition

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Abstract

Phonological and visual dysfunctions may result in reading deficits like those encountered in developmental dyslexia. Here, we use a novel approach to induce similar reading difficulties in normal readers in an event-related fMRI study, thus systematically investigating which brain regions relate to different pathways relating to orthographic-phonological (e.g. grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, GPC) vs. visual processing. Based upon a previous behavioural study (Tholen et al. 2011), the retrieval of phonemes from graphemes was manipulated by lowering the identifiability of letters in familiar vs. unfamiliar shapes. Visual word and letter processing was impeded by presenting the letters of a word in a moving, non-stationary manner. FMRI revealed that the visual condition activated cytoarchitectonically defined area hOC5 in the magnocellular pathway and area 7A in the right mesial parietal cortex. In contrast, the grapheme manipulation revealed different effects localised predominantly in bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (left cytoarchitectonic area 44; right area 45) and inferior parietal lobule (including areas PF/PFm), regions that have been demonstrated to show abnormal activation in dyslexic as compared to normal readers. This pattern of activation bears close resemblance to recent findings in dyslexic samples both behaviourally and with respect to the neurofunctional activation patterns. The novel paradigm may thus prove useful in future studies to understand reading problems related to distinct pathways, potentially providing a link also to the understanding of real reading impairments in dyslexia.

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Notes

  1. In the study by Tholen et al. (2011), four levels of motion were used. Since there was a reliable main effect of the amplitude of motion, the paradigm was simplified to only two levels, thus allowing more trials per condition and a higher experimental power. Please refer to “Results” to see that this amendment led to a good replication of the findings obtained with the four levels of motion.

  2. Eight conditions result from the three factors WORD-TYPE (word vs. pseudoword) × MOVEMENT (Amplitude 0 vs. Amplitude 50) × FONT (Normal vs. Graffiti).

  3. Due to a technical problem, only behavioural data sets from 24 participants were recorded. Consequently, only these were considered here for RT analysis. Missing values in these participants were replaced by group cell means. For accuracy data, two of these datasets were not complete; therefore, only 22 data sets entered the analysis.

  4. Most previous neuroimaging studies used the labels “V5/MT” or “V5/MT+” when referring to effects in the motion-sensitive aspect of the posterior MTG: In order to avoid confusion between these labels, which are partly used in a very broad manner, and the present findings based on cytoarchitectonic probability maps, we use the following terms. If the activation cluster overlaps with a cytoarchitectonically defined region, e.g. hOC5, this label is used. If no such overlap is observed, we prefer the term “posterior MTG” where appropriate.

  5. Note that a conjunction analysis is as conservative as inclusive masking, or even more so because each voxel is assigned the lower of the values of the respective contrast images of which it is computed.

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Acknowledgments

Marion Grande and Stefan Heim were supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF Grants 01GJ0613, 01GJ0614, and 01GJ0804).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section Structural Functional Brain Mapping, Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, Pauwelsstraße 30, 52074, Aachen, Germany

    Stefan Heim & Katrin Amunts

  2. Research Centre Jülich, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Jülich, Germany

    Stefan Heim, Ann-Christin von Overheidt, Nicole Tholen & Katrin Amunts

  3. Section Clinical and Cognitive Neurosciences, Department of Neurology, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Stefan Heim, Ann-Christin von Overheidt, Nicole Tholen & Marion Grande

  4. JARA-Translational Brain Medicine, Jülich and Aachen, Germany

    Stefan Heim & Katrin Amunts

  5. Research Centre Jülich, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-3), Jülich, Germany

    Ralph Weidner

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  1. Stefan Heim
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  2. Ralph Weidner
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  3. Ann-Christin von Overheidt
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Correspondence to Stefan Heim.

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Heim, S., Weidner, R., von Overheidt, AC. et al. Experimental induction of reading difficulties in normal readers provides novel insights into the neurofunctional mechanisms of visual word recognition. Brain Struct Funct 219, 461–471 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-013-0509-7

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