Dyslexia and the perks of being bilingual: a study on the neurobiology of reading with the use of fMRI.

Abstract

The objective of the present study was to investigate reading performance and brain activation associated with reading for bilingual and monolingual dyslexics (DDB-DDM), and typical bilinguals as Controls (C). The behavioral results showed that DDB outperformed DDM in all reading components in Portuguese. In the tasks applied in English, there was no significant difference in the performance of DDB compared to C. The results of the brain imaging for the task in Portuguese showed C presented significant activation of the left occipitotemporal and left inferior frontal gyrus while reading words. DDB and DDM, in turn, showed deactivation of left temporoparietal region and no significant activation in the left occipitotemporal region or left inferior frontal gyrus. For the FAST LOC task, DDB showed hypoactivity in the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) during word reading, both in English and Portuguese. The findings provide evidence for a possible positive impact of bilingualism on the reading performance of dyslexics.

Keywords

• bilingualism; dyslexia; VWFA; reading; fMRI.
• Bilingualism
• Dyslexia
• VWFA
• Reading
• fMRI