Disentangling influences of dyslexia, development, and reading experience on effective brain connectivity in children

Pietro, Sarah V. Di; Willinger, David; Frei, Nada; Lutz, Christina; Coraj, Seline; Schneider, Chiara; Stämpfli, Philipp; Brem, Silvia

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.119869

Cited by 14 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 93 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The DAN’s resulting glutamatergic overstimulation and loss of neuroplasticity has the potential for impeding the fidelity of down-stream forward inhibitory control and inhibitory feedback to the reading circuit (i.e., right IPS > left IPS > VWFA), via the VOF which is the final pathway between the left IPS and the VWFA. Indeed, research with individuals with dyslexia reported degraded connectivity between the VWFA and bilateral regions of the DAN (van der Mark et al 2011 ) and a recent study presented evidence for a causal role in dyslexia of anomalies in inhibitory connectivity between the VOF and the VWFA (Di Pietro et al 2023 ). Thus, atypical changes in BDNF trafficking provoked by ELS may trigger a causal chain leading to dyslexia by the end-point disruption of the functions of the VWFA, impairing children’s ability to learn the print–sound associations fundamental to beginning reading.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early life stress, literacy and dyslexia: an evolutionary perspective

Kershner

2024

Brain Struct Funct

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Stress and learning co-evolved in parallel, with their interdependence critical to the survival of the species. Even today, the regulation of moderate levels of stress by the central autonomic network (CAN), especially during pre- and post-natal periods, facilitates biological adaptability and is an essential precursor for the cognitive requisites of learning to read. Reading is a remarkable evolutionary achievement of the human brain, mysteriously unusual, because it is not pre-wired with a genetic address to facilitate its acquisition. There is no gene for reading. The review suggests that reading co-opts a brain circuit centered in the left hemisphere ventral occipital cortex that evolved as a domain-general visual processor. Its adoption by reading depends on the CAN’s coordination of the learning and emotional requirements of learning to read at the metabolic, cellular, synaptic, and network levels. By stabilizing a child’s self-control and modulating the attention network’s inhibitory controls over the reading circuit, the CAN plays a key role in school readiness and learning to read. In addition, the review revealed two beneficial CAN evolutionary adjustments to early-life stress “overloads” that come with incidental costs of school under-performance and dyslexia. A short-term adaptation involving methylation of the FKBP5 and NR3C1 genes is a liability for academic achievement in primary school. The adaptation leading to dyslexia induces alterations in BDNF trafficking, promoting long-term adaptive fitness by protecting against excessive glucocorticoid toxicity but risks reading difficulties by disruptive signaling from the CAN to the attention networks and the reading circuit.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early life stress, literacy and dyslexia: an evolutionary perspective

Kershner

2024

Brain Struct Funct

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Another effect of maturation also involves the changes in connectivity among relevant brain regions ( Cao et al, 2018 , Horwitz et al, 1998 ). This may include alterations in structural and functional connections to other regions of both the language network and the attentional system ( Bitan et al, 2009 , Chen et al, 2019 , Di Pietro et al, 2023 , Morken et al, 2017 , Takemura et al, 2016 , Weiner et al, 2017 , Yeatman et al, 2014 ). Such changes in connectivity and the associated changes in feedback processing in vOTC could modulate the activation measured.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both the STC and vOTC, as well as other regions of the reading network such as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and parietal regions, are thus tightly coupled and interact to process and integrate information efficiently through bottom-up and top-down feedback mechanisms. Previous studies have shown that functional and effective connectivity between areas of the reading network depends on the reading stage and reading skills ( Bitan et al, 2009 , Chen et al, 2019 , Di Pietro et al, 2023 , Morken et al, 2017 , Wang et al, 2020 , Wise Younger et al, 2017 , Yu et al, 2018 ) and that aberrant connectivity within the reading network is linked to reading difficulties ( Richlan, 2019 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurodevelopmental trajectories of letter and speech sound processing from preschool to the end of elementary school

Pietro

Karipidis

Pleisch

et al. 2023

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…The strength of the experimental design we used is that it allowed us to test the two major hypotheses discussed in the literature on the causes of dyslexia, namely, the visuo-attentional deficit hypothesis and the phonological one, using a continuum of stimuli ranging from French words to symbol and consonant strings, pseudowords, and pseudohomophones. Several studies investigated neural correlates underlying developmental dyslexia through a phonological lexical decision task (among either children or adults) during EEG [ 50 ] and fMRI registration [ 51 , 52 ]. To our knowledge, this is the first study using the phonological lexical decision task to examine eye movements in dyslexia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visuo-Attentional and Phonological Deficits Explored in French Students with Dyslexia: Eye Movements Recorded during a Phonological Lexical Decision Task

Premeti,

Isel,

Bucci

2024

Neurology International

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Whether dyslexia is caused by phonological or attentional dysfunction remains a widely debated issue. To enrich this debate, we compared the eye movements of 32 French university students with (14 students) and without (18 students) dyslexia while performing a delayed phonological lexical decision task on 300 visually presented stimuli. The processing stimuli involved either a lexical (i.e., words) or a non-lexical route relying on a grapheme-phoneme correspondence (pseudohomophones and pseudowords), while other stimuli involved only a visual search (consonant and symbol sequences). We recorded the number of fixations, the duration of the first fixation and the amplitude of saccades made on the stimuli. Compared to the controls, the participants with dyslexia made more fixations while reading regardless of the type of stimulus (lexical and non-lexical). Crucially, the participants with dyslexia exhibited longer first fixations in particular while reading phonologically challenging stimuli such as pseudohomophones and pseudowords compared to stimuli involving a simple visual search (consonants, symbols). Taken together, these results suggest that both visual and phonological impairments may be implicated in dyslexia, supporting the hypothesis that dyslexia is a multifactorial deficit.

show abstract

Disentangling influences of dyslexia, development, and reading experience on effective brain connectivity in children

Cited by 14 publications

References 93 publications

Early life stress, literacy and dyslexia: an evolutionary perspective

Early life stress, literacy and dyslexia: an evolutionary perspective

Neurodevelopmental trajectories of letter and speech sound processing from preschool to the end of elementary school

Visuo-Attentional and Phonological Deficits Explored in French Students with Dyslexia: Eye Movements Recorded during a Phonological Lexical Decision Task

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About