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Intensive Instruction Affects Brain Magnetic Activity Associated with Oral Word Reading in Children with Persistent Reading Disabilities

Department of Psychology at the University of Crete, Greece, psimos{at}psy.soc .uoc.gr

Jack M. Fletcher

University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston, Center for Academic and Reading Skills (CARS)

Shirin Sarkari

Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston

Rebecca Billingsley-Marshall

Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston

Carolyn A. Denton

Department of Special Education at the University of Texas at Austin, Vaughn-Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts at the university

Andrew C. Papanicolaou

Department of Neurosurgery, Division of Clinical Neurosciences and of the Magnetoencephalography Laboratory at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston

Fifteen children ages 7 to 9 years who had persistent reading difficulties despite adequate instruction were provided with intensive tutorial interventions. The interventions targeted deficient phonological processing and decoding skills for 8 weeks (2 hours per day) followed by an 8-week, 1-hour-per-day intervention that focused on the development of reading fluency skills. Spatiotemporal brain activation profiles were obtained at baseline and after each 8-week intervention program using magnetoencephalography during the performance of an oral sight-word reading task. Changes in brain activity were found in the posterior part of the middle temporal gyrus (Brodmann's Area [BA] 21: increased degree of activity and reduced onset latency), the lateral occipitotemporal region (BA 19/37: decreased onset latency of activation), and the premotor cortex (increased onset latency). Overall changes associated with the intervention were primarily normalizing, as indicated by (a) increased activity in a region that is typically involved in lexical—semantic processing (BA 21) and (b) a shift in the relative timing of regional activity in temporal and frontal cortices to a pattern typically seen in unimpaired readers. These findings extend previous results in demonstrating significant changes in the spatiotemporal profile of activation associated with word reading in response to reading remediation.

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