Neural impact of Skill and Goal-based Training in Adults with Dyslexia: A Randomized Trial

Abstract

AbstractStudies on neurobiological mechanisms of dyslexia-related interventions are ubiquitous in the literature; however, almost all of the studies come from interventions performed with children. Since dyslexia is a lifelong disorder, there needs to be more work done to understand an adult’s brain response to intervention. We recruited twenty adults with dyslexia to participate in an eight-week online intervention study. Before and after the intervention, all participants completed two functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) tasks to assess sound awareness (i.e., phoneme deletion) and sentence comprehension (i.e., sentence comprehension) skills. We found group-specific intervention effects, in which the Skill-based group significantly improved their accuracy of phoneme deletion task. In contrast, no intervention impact was evident for the sentence comprehension task. The fNIRS results provided evidence for both normalizing (i.e., significant activation in the typical reading network) and compensatory changes (i.e., significant activation in the regions outside of the reading network) in brain, namely in the left fusiform gyrus and right superior temporal gyrus, respectively. These results are further discussed in the context of function of the brain structures and the previous evidence from intervention studies.