Shaywitz, Dyslexia, 2005
Shaywitz, Dyslexia, 2005
Shaywitz, Dyslexia, 2005
his paper reviews progress in understanding developmental dyslexia. Our focus is on recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of reading and dyslexia, though we briefly review the scientific context that informs these fMRI studies, including definition, history, cognitive mechanisms and outcome.
0006-3223/05/$30.00 doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.01.043
S.E. Shaywitz and B.A. Shaywitz order linguistic function (phonology) blocks access to higherorder processes and to the ability to draw meaning from text. The problem is that the affected reader cannot use his or her higher-order linguistic skills to access the meaning until the printed word has first been decoded and identified. Suppose, for example, an individual who knows the precise meaning of the spoken word apparition; however, she will not be able to use her knowledge of the meaning of the word until she can decode and identify the printed word on the page and it will appear that she does not to know the words meaning.
Outcome
Deficits in phonological coding continue to characterize dyslexic readers even in adolescence; performance on phonological processing measures contributes most to discriminating dyslexic and average adolescent readers, and average and superior readers as well (Shaywitz et al 1999). Children with dyslexia neither spontaneously remit nor do they demonstrate a lag mechanism for catching up in the development of reading skills. That is not to say that many dyslexic readers do not become quite proficient in reading a finite domain of words that are in their area of special interest, usually words that are important for their careers. For example, an individual who is dyslexic in childhood but who, in adult life becomes interested in molecular biology might then learn to decode words that form a minivocabulary important in molecular biology. Such an individual, while able to decode words in this domain still exhibits evidence of his early reading problems when he has to read unfamiliar words, which he then does accurately but not fluently and automatically (Ben-Dror et al 1991; Bruck 1992, 1994; Lefly and Pennington 1991; Shaywitz et al 1999). In adolescents, the rate of reading as well as facility with spelling may be most useful clinically in differentiating average from poor readers. From a clinical perspective, these data indicate that as children approach adolescence, a manifestation of dyslexia may be a very slow reading rate; in fact, children may learn to read words accurately, but they will not be fluent or automatic, reflecting the lingering effects of a phonologic deficit (Lefly and Pennington 1991). Because they are able to read words accurately (albeit very slowly) dyslexic adolescents and young adults may mistakenly be assumed to have outgrown their dyslexia. Data from studies of children with dyslexia who have been followed prospectively support the notion that in adolescents, the rate of reading as well as facility with spelling may be most useful clinically in differentiating average from poor readers in students in secondary school, and college and even graduate school. It is important to remember that these older dyslexic students may be similar to their unimpaired peers on untimed measures of word recognition yet continue to suffer from the phonologic deficit that makes reading less automatic, more effortful, and slow. For these readers with dyslexia the provision of extra time is an essential accommodation; it allows them the time to decode each word and to apply their unimpaired higher-order cognitive and linguistic skills to the surrounding context to get at the meaning of words that they cannot entirely or rapidly decode. With such accommodations, many students with dyslexia are now successfully completing studies in a range of disciplines, including medicine. It is important to appreciate that phonologic difficulties in dyslexia are independent of intelligence, consequently, many highly intelligent boys and girls have reading problems which are often overlooked and even ascribed to lack of motivation. In counseling their patients who are dyslexic, physicians
Figure 1. Trajectory of reading skills over time in nonimpaired and dyslexic readers. Ordinate is Rasch scores (W scores) from the Woodcock-Johnson reading test (Woodcock and Johnson 1989) and abscissa is age in years. Both dyslexic and nonimpaired readers improve their reading scores as they get older, but the gap between the dyslexic and nonimpaired readers remains. Thus dyslexia is a decit and not a developmental lag. Figure derived from data in (Francis et al 1996) and reprinted from (Shaywitz 2003) with permission.
represent the sounds of spoken language. In order to read, a child has to develop the insight that spoken words can be pulled apart into the elemental particles of speech (phonemes) and that the letters in a written word represent these sounds (Shaywitz 2003); such awareness is largely missing in dyslexic children and adults (Bruck 1992; Fletcher et al 1994; Liberman and Shankweiler 1991; Shankweiler et al 1979; Shaywitz 2003; Torgesen 1995; Wagner and Torgesen 1987). Results from large and well-studied populations with reading disability confirm that in young school-age children (Fletcher et al 1994; Stanovich and Siegel 1994) as well as in adolescents (Shaywitz et al 1999) a deficit in phonology represents the most robust and specific correlate of reading disability (Morris et al 1998; Ramus et al 2003). Such findings form the basis for the most successful and evidence-based interventions designed to improve reading; such interventions detailed in the Report of the National Reading Panel include five critical elements: phonemic awareness; phonics; fluency; vocabulary and comprehension (Report 2000). Implications of the Phonologic Model of Dyslexia Reading comprises two main processes - decoding and comprehension (Gough and Tunmer 1986). In dyslexia, a deficit at the level of the phonologic module impairs the ability to segment the spoken word into its underlying phonologic elements and then link each letter(s) to its corresponding sound. As a result, the reader experiences difficulty, first in decoding the word and then in identifying it. The phonologic deficit is domain-specific; that is, it is independent of other, nonphonologic, abilities. In particular, the higher order cognitive and linguistic functions involved in comprehension, such as general intelligence and reasoning, vocabulary (Share and Stanovich 1995), and syntax (Shankweiler et al 1995), are generally intact. This pattern - a deficit in phonologic analysis contrasted with intact higher-order cognitive abilities - offers an explanation for the paradox of otherwise intelligent, often gifted, people who experience great difficulty in reading (Shaywitz 1996, 2003). According to the model, a circumscribed deficit in a lowerwww.sobp.org/journal
S.E. Shaywitz and B.A. Shaywitz should bear in mind that a range of outcomes characterize adults with a childhood history of dyslexia. Indeed, many, including physicians, are often unaware that dyslexic individuals have been successful in a range of professions and disciplines and are represented in our most distinguished authors, poets, educators, attorneys, physicians, and scientists. For example, at least two Nobel laureates, Niels Bohr and Baruj Benacceraf were also dyslexic. While there is accumulating empiric data to guide interventions in children, the kinds of rigorous studies to determine the most effective interventions for adolescents and adults are just underway. Similarly, while the same five elements identified by the National Reading Panel (Report 2000) for children are also important for older individuals, the issue of how to implement such programs at older ages is not fully resolved. What is currently known about reading programs and interventions for adolescents and adults with dyslexia is discussed in Shaywitz (2003).
Neurobiological Studies
To a large degree these advances in understanding the cognitive basis of dyslexia have informed and facilitated studies examining the neurobiological underpinnings of reading and dyslexia. Thus, a range of neurobiologic investigations using postmortem brain specimens (Galaburda et al 1985), and more recently, brain morphometry (Brown et al 2001; Eliez et al 2000; Filipek 1996) and diffusion tensor MRI imaging (Klingberg et al 2000) suggests that there are differences in the temporo-parietooccipital brain regions between dyslexic and nonimpaired readers. Functional Brain Imaging Rather than being limited to examining the brain in an autopsy specimen, or measuring the size of brain regions using static morphometric indices based on CT or MRI, functional imaging offers the possibility of examining brain function during performance of a cognitive task. This review focuses on functional magnetic resonance imaging which measures changes in metabolic activity and blood flow in specific brain regions while subjects are engaged in cognitive tasks. The term functional imaging has also been applied to the technology of magnetic source imaging using magnetoencephalography, an electrophysiologic method with strengths in resolving the chronometric properties of cognitive processes. This technique allows examination of neural function at the time scale of milliseconds in contrast to fMRI which typically allows measurements on the order of seconds. We refer to some MEG studies in discussing results of fMRI studies and the reader is referred to more detailed reviews of MEG by Papinicolaou and his associates (Papanicolaou et al 2003). Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) promises to supplant other methods for its ability to map the individual brains response to specific cognitive stimuli. Since it is noninvasive and safe, it can be used repeatedly, properties which make it ideal for studying humans, especially children. The principles of fMRI depend on the principle of autoregulation of cerebral blood flow. When an individual is asked to perform a discrete cognitive task, that task places processing demands on particular neural systems in the brain. To meet those demands requires activation of neural systems in specific brain regions and those changes in neural activity are, in turn, reflected by changes in brain metabolic activity, which in turn, are reflected, for example,
S.E. Shaywitz and B.A. Shaywitz primarily from studies of acquired alexia describes neuroanatomic lesions most prominently centered about the angular gyrus, a region considered pivotal in mapping the visual percept of the print onto the phonologic structures of the language system (Damasio and Damasio 1983; Friedman et al 1993; Geschwind 1965). Thus, it is reasonable to suggest that this temporo-parietal reading system may be critical for analyzing the written word, that is, transforming the orthography into the underlying linguistic structures. Perhaps the best evidence for a computational role linked to a specific reading system comes from evidence indicating that a second posterior reading system, located in left occipito-temporal area, is critical for the development of skilled reading and functions as an automatic, instant word recognition system, the visual word form area (Cohen et al 2000, 2002; McCandliss et al 2003). Not only does brain activation in this region increase as reading skill increases (Shaywitz et al 2002) (Figure 3); this region responds preferentially to rapidly presented stimuli (Price et al 1996), responds within 150 msec after presentation of a stimulus (Salmelin et al 1996), and is engaged even when the word has not been consciously perceived (Dehaene et al 2001). The third reading related neural circuit involves an anterior system in the inferior frontal gyrus (Brocas area), a region that has long been associated with articulation and also serves an important function in silent reading and naming (Fiez and Peterson 1998; Frackowiak et al 2004). Plasticity of Neural Systems for Reading Given the converging evidence of a disruption of posterior reading systems in dyslexia, an obvious question relates to the plasticity of these neural systems, that is, whether they are malleable and can be changed by an effective reading interven-
Figure 2. Composite maps (columns 1 and 2) demonstrating brain activation in nonimpaired (NI) and dyslexic (DYS) readers as they determined whether two visually-presented pseudowords rhymed (NWR, nonword rhyme), and composite contrast maps (column 3) comparing directly the brain activation of the two groups. The colored regions in Columns 1 and 2 statistical parametric maps and represent relative activation compared to a baseline task. In columns 1 and 2, red-yellow indicates areas that had significantly greater activation (p .05) in the NWR task compared to the line task, and in column 3, red-yellow indicates brain regions that were more active in NI compared to DYS during the NWR task. The four rows of images from top to bottom correspond to z 23, 14, 5, and 5 in Talairach space (Talairach and Tournoux 1988). The legend for brain activation is: (1) middle frontal gyrus, (2) inferior frontal gyrus, (3) anterior cingulate gyrus, (4) supramarginal gyrus, (5) cuneus, (6) basal ganglia, (7) superior temporal gyrus, (8) superior temporal sulcus and posterior aspect of the superior and middle temporal gyri, (9) lingual gyrus, (10) middle occipital gyrus, (11) anterior aspect of superior temporal gyrus, (12) medial orbital gyrus, (13) inferior occipital gyrus, and (14) posterior aspect of middle temporal gyrus and anterior aspect of middle occipital gyrus. Figure from Shaywitz et al (2002) with permission.
posterior reading circuits is already present in dyslexic children and cannot be ascribed simply to a lifetime of poor reading. Compensatory Systems in Dyslexic Readers The study design also allowed for the examination of compensatory systems which develop in dyslexic readers. Two kinds of information were helpful in examining this issue. One involved the relationship between brain activation and age. During the most difficult and specific phonologic task (nonword rhyming) older compared to younger, dyslexic readers engaged the left and right inferior frontal gyrus, in contrast to nonimpaired readers where few differences emerged between older and younger readers. Another clue to compensatory systems comes from the findings of the relationship between reading skill and brain activation. As noted above, a significant positive correlation exists between reading skill and activation in the left occipitotemporal word form area. We also found a negative correlation between brain activation and reading skill in the right occipitotemporal region, that is, the poorer the reader, the greater the activation in the right occipito-temporal region. Thus compensatory systems seem to involve areas around the inferior frontal gyrus in both hemispheres as well as the right hemisphere analogue of the left occipito-temporal word form area. Computational Roles of the Component Systems Accumulating evidence has begun to assign specific computational roles to the components of the reading system. Evidence www.sobp.org/journal
Figure 3. Correlation map between reading skill as measured by the Word Attack reading test (Woodcock and Johnson 1989) performed out of magnet during two activation tasks, judging whether two pseudowords rhymed (NWR) and judging whether two real words were in the same category (CAT). At each voxel, a Pearson correlation coefcient (r) was calculated with age included as a covariate; a normal distribution test was used (Hays 1988). Areas in yellow-red show a positive correlation of in-magnet tasks with the out of magnet reading test (threshold, p .01). The four rows of images from top to bottom correspond to Z 23, 14, 5 and 5 of Talairach atlas. Strong correlation was found in the inferior aspect of the temporal occipital region (fourth row), in the more superior aspect of the temporal occipital regions (second and third rows), and in the parietal regions (top row). Figure from Shaywitz et al (2002), with permission.
S.E. Shaywitz and B.A. Shaywitz tion. In a recent report (Shaywitz et al 2004) we hypothesized that the provision of an evidence-based, phonologically mediated reading intervention would improve reading fluency and the development of the neural systems serving skilled reading. Second and third graders were recruited for three experimental groups: experimental intervention (EI, n 37); community intervention (CI, n 12) and community controls, i.e., nonimpaired readers (CC, n 28). Children in the community intervention met criteria for reading disability and received a variety of interventions commonly provided within the school; specific, systematic, explicit phonologically-based interventions comparable to the experimental intervention were not used in any of the reading programs that were provided to the community group. The experimental intervention provided second and third grade poor readers with 50 minutes of daily, individual tutoring that was explicit and systematic and focused on helping children understand the alphabetic principle (how letters and combinations of letters represent the small segments of speech known as phonemes). Children were imaged on three occasions, preintervention, immediately post-intervention, and one year after the intervention was complete. Children who received the experimental intervention improved their reading accuracy, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Compared to CI, both CC, and EI demonstrate increased activation in left hemisphere regions including the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior aspect of the middle temporal gyrus. CC and EI are very similar. One year after the experimental intervention had ended (Figure 4), compared to their pre-intervention images, EI were activating bilateral inferior frontal gyri, left superior temporal sulcus, the occipital temporal
Figure 4. Composite maps indicating the difference in activation between year 3 and year 1 in the experimental intervention (EI) study group (n 25). Red-yellow indicates brain regions that were more active (p .05) in the third year; blue-purple indicates brain regions that were more active (p .05) in the rst year. The slice locations are 12, and 4 in Talairach space. Brain regions (Talairach x,y,z, coordinates in parenthesis) more active in the third year compared to the rst were (1) bilateral inferior frontal gyri ( 41, 23, 12), (2) the left superior temporal sulcus (51, 42, 12), (3) the occipital temporal region involving the posterior aspects of the middle and inferior temporal gyri and the anterior aspect of the middle occipital gyrus (42, 49, 4), (4) the inferior occipital gyrus (34, 71, 4), and (5) the lingual gyrus (13, 88, 4). The brain regions more active in the rst year compared with the third year were (6) the right middle temporal gyrus ( 35, 69, 12) and (7) the caudate nucleus ( 7, 10, 4). Figure from Shaywitz et al (2004), with permission.
S.E. Shaywitz and B.A. Shaywitz literacy. These findings are consonant with a large body of evidence indicating that the impact of dyslexia can be modified by the availability of compensatory resources, for example, semantic knowledge (Snowling et al 2000), use of context (Frith and Snowling 1983; Nation and Snowling 1998), and verbal ability (Torgesen et al 2001) to compensate for phonologic deficits. In adults, verbal abilities, as measured by verbal IQ, directly predict reading accuracy, with phonologic factors influencing reading indirectly through their effects on verbal IQ (Berninger et al 2001). The current study extends such findings by demonstrating that childhood cognitive ability may be an important influence on the development of reading skills in later childhood and into adult life. Beginning reading is most related to phonologic skills and within a few years other language skills, for example semantic knowledge, gain in importance. The current findings suggest that greater cognitive abilities may provide some degree of compensation for a reading difficulty; intuitively this makes sense since a larger vocabulary and better reasoning skills are helpful when a struggling reader is trying to decipher unknown words. If the word is in his spoken language vocabulary the beginning reader may recognize the word even if he can only partially sound it out. Strong reasoning abilities also help this reader to use the context around an unknown word to figure out its meaning. The imaging findings noted earlier which demonstrate a greater number of ancillary systems in AIR compared to PPR may represent the neural correlates of this compensation. Finally, for the first time, results from functional brain imaging studies distinguish two potential types of reading disability. These are consistent with Olsons suggestion of two possible etiologies for childhood reading disability: a primarily genetic type with IQ scores over 100 and a more environmentally influenced type with IQs below 100 (Olson 1999; Olson et al
Figure 5. Composite maps demonstrating brain activation in nonimpaired (NI), accuracy improved (AIR), and persistently poor (PPR) readers during the nonword rhyme (NWR) reading task. Red-yellow indicates areas that had signicantly greater activation (p .05) in the reading task compared to the line task. Blue-purple indicates areas that had signicantly greater activation (p .05) in the line task compared to the reading task. The slice locations correspond to a z levels of 4 in the Talairach and Tournoux atlas (Talairach and Tournoux 1988). Following standard MRI nomenclature, the right side of the axial slice corresponds to the left hemisphere. The legend for regional brain activation is as follows: (1) inferior frontal gyrus, (2) precentral gyrus, (3) insula, (4) superior temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, (5) middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, (6) cuneus, (7) middle occipital gyrus, (8) anterior cingulate sulcus and adjacent aspects of the cingulate gyrus and superior frontal gyrus, (9) posterior middle temporal gyrus and anterior middle occipital gyrus, (10) anterior aspect of the superior temporal gyrus, (11) inferior occipital gyrus, (12) middle temporal gyrus, (13) superior frontal gyrus, (14) posterior cingulate gyrus, (15) lingual gyrus, (16) medial occipital temporal gyrus (parahippocampal region), and (17) basal ganglia. Figure modied from Figure 1 in Shaywitz et al (2003), with permission.
reading real words very differently from NI readers, reading the very simple real words primarily by memory. One piece of evidence was that PPR readers were accurate while reading high frequency words, but far less accurate when reading low frequency and unfamiliar words. A second bit of evidence emerged from functional connectivity analysis (McIntosh et al 1996, 1997) which indicated that NI readers demonstrated connectivity between left hemisphere posterior and anterior reading systems (Figure 6, column 1). In contrast, PPR subjects (Figure 6, column 2) demonstrated functional connectivity between left posterior reading systems and right prefrontal areas often associated with working memory and memory retrieval (Fletcher et al 1997; MacLeod et al 1998). Insight into some of the factors responsible for compensation on the one hand and persistence on the other comes from an examination of early childhood measures. The two groups of disabled readers (AIR and PPR) began school with comparable reading skills and sharing similar family socioeconomic status but with PPR exhibiting poorer cognitive ability and tending to attend more disadvantaged schools. These findings suggest that despite similar socioeconomic risk factors for reading disability early in life, the presence of compensatory factors such as stronger cognitive ability and perhaps, better schools, allowed the AIR to minimize, in part, the consequences of their phonologic deficit so that as adults AIR were indistinguishable from NI on a measure of reading comprehension and a measure of prose www.sobp.org/journal
Figure 6. Group connectivity proles between the seed voxel in the left occipito-temporal region (Talairach coordinates 55, 36, 5) and other brain regions during the CAT (real word) reading task. Red-yellow indicates signicant positive correlations (p .02); blue-purple indicates negative correlation. The images correspond to z 24 in Talairach space. In the nonimpaired readers (on left), a strong positive correlation is observed between the left occipito-temporal region and the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brocas area), a traditional language region. In contrast, for persistently poor readers, the occipito-temporal region is correlated with regions in the right superior, middle and inferior frontal gyri, brain regions believed to play a role in attention and memory. Figure from Shaywitz et al (2003), with permission.
S.E. Shaywitz and B.A. Shaywitz 1999; Wadsworth et al 2000). Though clearly both genetic and environmental factors play a role in reading in all children, it is intriguing to speculate that the AIR subjects may represent a predominantly genetic type while the PPR group, with significantly lower IQ and a trend to attend more disadvantaged schools may represent a more environmentally influenced type of dyslexic reader. Another possibility is that both types, AIR and PPR, have a genetic predisposition, but in the case of AIR the genetic predisposition is modified somewhat by positive environmental influences and higher cognitive abilities. These findings have important educational implications and are of special relevance for teaching children to read. Consistent with our knowledge of the components of reading, children need to be able to sound out words in order to decode them accurately and then, they need to know the meaning of the word to help decode and comprehend the printed message. Both the sounds and the meanings of words must be taught. These findings suggest that it may be beneficial to provide early interventions aimed at stimulating both phonologic and verbal abilities in children at-risk for reading difficulties associated with disadvantage.
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