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Research Articles, Behavioral/Cognitive

Reduced structural connectivity between left auditory thalamus and the motion-sensitive planum temporale in developmental dyslexia

Nadja Tschentscher, Anja Ruisinger, Helen Blank, Begoña Díaz and Katharina von Kriegstein
Journal of Neuroscience 14 January 2019, 1435-18; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1435-18.2018
Nadja Tschentscher
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, GermanyResearch Unit Biological Psychology, Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802 Munich, Germany
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Anja Ruisinger
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
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Helen Blank
University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Center for Experimental Medicine, Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Martinistraße 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany
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Begoña Díaz
Center for Brain and Cognition, Departament de Tecnología de les Comunicacions, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
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Katharina von Kriegstein
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, GermanyDepartment of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany
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Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by the inability to acquire typical reading and writing skills. Dyslexia has been frequently linked to cerebral cortex alterations; however recent evidence also points towards sensory thalamus dysfunctions: dyslexics showed reduced responses in the left auditory thalamus (medial geniculate body, MGB) during speech processing in contrast to neurotypical readers. In addition, in the visual modality, dyslexics have reduced structural connectivity between the left visual thalamus (lateral geniculate nucleus, LGN) and V5/MT - a cerebral cortex region involved in visual movement processing. Higher LGN-V5/MT connectivity in dyslexics was associated with the faster rapid naming of letters and numbers (RANln), a measure that is highly correlated with reading proficiency. We here tested two hypotheses that were directly derived from these previous findings. First, we tested the hypothesis that dyslexics have reduced structural connectivity between the left MGB and the auditory motion-sensitive part of the left planum temporale (mPT). Second, we hypothesized that the amount of left mPT-MGB connectivity correlates with dyslexics RANln scores. Using diffusion tensor imaging based probabilistic tracking we show that male adults with developmental dyslexia have reduced structural connectivity between the left MGB and the left mPT -- confirming the first hypothesis. Stronger left mPT-MGB connectivity was not associated with faster RANnl scores in dyslexics, but in neurotypical readers. Our findings provide first evidence that reduced cortico-thalamic connectivity in the auditory modality is a feature of developmental dyslexia, and that it may also impact on reading related cognitive abilities in neurotypical readers.

Significance Statement

Developmental dyslexia is one of the most widespread learning disabilities. While previous neuroimaging research mainly focused on pathomechanisms of dyslexia at the cerebral cortex level, several lines of evidence suggest an atypical functioning of subcortical sensory structures. By means of diffusion tensor imaging, we here show that dyslexic male adults have reduced white matter connectivity in a cortico-thalamic auditory pathway between the left auditory motion-sensitive planum temporale (mPT) and the left medial geniculate body (MGB). Connectivity strength of this pathway was associated with measures of reading fluency in neurotypical readers. This is novel evidence on the neurocognitive correlates of reading proficiency, highlighting the importance of cortico-subcortical interactions between regions involved in the processing of spectrotemporally complex sound.

Footnotes

  • The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Reduced structural connectivity between left auditory thalamus and the motion-sensitive planum temporale in developmental dyslexia
Nadja Tschentscher, Anja Ruisinger, Helen Blank, Begoña Díaz, Katharina von Kriegstein
Journal of Neuroscience 14 January 2019, 1435-18; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1435-18.2018

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Reduced structural connectivity between left auditory thalamus and the motion-sensitive planum temporale in developmental dyslexia
Nadja Tschentscher, Anja Ruisinger, Helen Blank, Begoña Díaz, Katharina von Kriegstein
Journal of Neuroscience 14 January 2019, 1435-18; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1435-18.2018
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JNeurosci   Print ISSN: 0270-6474   Online ISSN: 1529-2401