Evidence for a dysfunction of left posterior reading areas in German dyslexic readers

The brain activity during a sentence reading task and a visual control task was examined with fMRI in 13 German dyslexic readers and 15 age-matched fluent readers (age: 14–16 years). These participants came from a longitudinal study and the dyslexic readers exhibited a persistent reading fluency deficit from early on. For the first time with German dyslexic readers, and in correspondence with the majority of functional imaging studies, we found reduced dyslexic activation in the left occipitotemporal cortex and in a small region of the left supramarginal gyrus. Enhanced activation was found in left inferior frontal and subcortical regions.