A near-infrared brain function study of Chinese dyslexic children

Recently, two findings using functional magnetic resonance imaging of dyslexic in Chinese show the left middle frontal gyrus is a crucial area associated with reading disability. The purpose of present study was to replicate the previous findings using near-infrared spectroscopy and a consonant-vowel task which engaged finer-grained phonological processing. Compared to the control group, our study showed the dyslexic children had decreased amounts of oxy-hemoglobin and total-hemoglobin in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results supported the previous findings and indicated that phonological deficit was also the cause of dyslexia in Chinese and it might be explained by decreased activity in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Our study suggests that dyslexic children have an abnormal hemodynamic pattern in the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left middle frontal gyrus, which can provide a new target for diagnosing or treating the condition with the near-infrared spectroscopy.