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Sensory theories of developmental dyslexia: three challenges for research

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 16, pages 43–54 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Recent years have seen the publication of a range of new theories suggesting that the basis of dyslexia might be sensory dysfunction. In this Opinion article, the evidence for and against several prominent sensory theories of dyslexia is closely scrutinized. Contrary to the causal claims being made, my analysis suggests that many proposed sensory deficits might result from the effects of reduced reading experience on the dyslexic brain. I therefore suggest that longitudinal studies of sensory processing, beginning in infancy, are required to successfully identify the neural basis of developmental dyslexia. Such studies could have a powerful impact on remediation.

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Figure 1: Coherent motion detection and visual area 5 activation in dyslexia.
Figure 2: Performance in the visual span task in dyslexia.
Figure 3: Visuospatial cueing tasks.
Figure 4: Examples of linguistic information assessed by auditory theories.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks the families and schools participating in research at the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge, UK, and the Medical Research Council for funding (grants G0400574 and G0902375).

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  1. Department of Psychology, Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK

    Usha Goswami

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  1. Usha Goswami
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The author receives funding for studying auditory sensory difficulties in children with dyslexia.

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Glossary

Cortical oscillations

The synchronous firing of neurons in networks of various sizes in different areas of the cortex, producing rhythmic patterns of activity. These oscillatory rhythms have endogenous temporal rates, and can phase-reset their activity to synchronize firing with incoming sensory information, thereby contributing to the processing of the input.

Formant transitions

Rapid changes in frequency (concentrations of acoustic energy within a narrow frequency band in the speech signal) as a speaker transitions from a consonant to a vowel, providing important cues to phonetic identity.

Frequency-doubling illusion

An illusion that depends on the spatial and temporal frequency of a flickering sinusoid grating (a pattern of lighter and darker bars). When a grating with a spatial frequency of 0.1–0.4 cycles per degree flickers faster than 15 Hz, the viewer sees a grating with much narrower lines (that is, the physical spatial frequency appears to double).

Logographically

When the meaning of a symbol is directly recognized without requiring recoding to sound. English logographs include £, % and >.

Magnocellular system

One of two major pathways in the visual system. The magnocellular system contains cells with larger cell bodies than the other (parvocellular) system. Magnocells respond optimally to motion and to visual stimuli that reverse contrast (areas of light versus dark) at lower spatial frequencies and at higher temporal frequencies. Responses are transient and the system is colour-blind.

Mental lexicon

The brain's mental dictionary, containing information about the meaning, pronunciation and grammatical status of words in the spoken language.

Onset-rime division

When a spoken syllable is divided at the vowel or syllable nucleus, the consonant phoneme(s) preceding the vowel are the linguistic onset and the vowel and any subsequent consonant phoneme(s) are the linguistic rime, as in 's-ee', 's-eep', 'sl-eep' and 'sl-ept'.

Orthography

The correct writing system of a language, used here to refer to the chosen symbol–sound correspondence system (such as the Western alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, Chinese characters or Devanagari).

Phonemes

The smallest units of sound that change a word's meaning.

Phonology

The inventory of the sound system of a language, comprising knowledge of the sounds themselves and the specific patterns or regularities by which sounds in words can be organized.

Posner cueing tasks

A neuropsychology paradigm for measuring spatial attention by cueing a target's future location and measuring whether this cue facilitates target detection. A Posner task usually includes a contrast between valid and invalid cues (only valid cues indicate the future correct location) and endogenous versus exogenous cues (endogenous cues are central to the visual field, whereas exogenous cues are outside the focus of attention or in the periphery).

Saccades

Rapid jerk-like movements of the eyeball that redirect the fovea to a new location in the visual field without a head movement or the conscious awareness of the observer.

Specific language impairment

A developmental disorder of language acquisition that delays the mastery of skills in children who have no hearing loss or other developmental delays.

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Goswami, U. Sensory theories of developmental dyslexia: three challenges for research. Nat Rev Neurosci 16, 43–54 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3836

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