Title
Failure of resting-state frontal–occipital connectivity in linking visual perception with reading fluency in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia
Abstract
It is widely accepted that impairment in visual perception impedes children's reading development, and further studies have demonstrated significant enhancement in reading fluency after visual perceptual training. However, the mechanism of the neural linkage between visual perception and reading is unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the intrinsic functional relationship between visual perception (indexed by the texture discrimination task,TDT) and reading ability (character reading and reading fluency) in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD) and those with typical development (TD). The resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between the primary visual cortex (V1, BA17) and the entire brain was analyzed. In addition, how RSFC maps are associated with TDT performance and reading ability in the DD and TD groups was examined. The results demonstrated that the strength of the RSFC between V1 and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG, BA9/BA46) was significantly correlated with both the threshold (SOA) of the TDT and reading fluency in TD children but not in DD children. Moreover, LMFG-V1 resting-state connectivity played a mediating role in the association of visual texture discrimination and reading fluency, but not in character reading, in TD children. In contrast, this mediation was absent in DD children, albeit their strengths of RSFC between V1 and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG) were comparable to those for the TD group. These findings indicate that typically developing children use the linkage of the RSFC between the V1 and LMFG for visual perception skills, which in turn promote fluent reading; in contrast, children with dyslexia, who had higher TDT thresholds than TD children, could not take advantage of their frontal–occipital connectivity to improve reading fluency abilities. These findings suggest that visual perception plays an important role in reading skills and that children with developmental dyslexia lack the ability to use their frontal–occipital connectivity to link visual perception with reading fluency.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117911
NeuroImage
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Texture discrimination task (TDT),Reading fluency,Resting-state functional connectivity,Primary visual cortex,Left middle frontal gyrus,Developmental dyslexia
Journal
233
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1053-8119
1
0.35
References 
Authors
7
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiujie Yang110.35
Jia Zhang210.35
Yaping Lv310.35
Fang Wang410.35
Guosheng Ding510.35
Manli Zhang684.21
Xiangzhi Meng710.35
Yan Song821.07