Investigation of Brain Activities During Reading of Children with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia by using Region of Interest Analysis

Developmental dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that can occur in a significant proportion of children around the world and manifests itself with delays and impairments in reading and writing processes that are not related to factors such as intelligence and education. Developmental dysgraphia combined with dyslexia is known as writing difficulty. This study was carried out in order to contribute to the literature as the similarities and differences with each other could not be clearly understood due to the insufficient number of studies in which the two learning disabilities were investigated together. The data used in the study are task-based functional images obtained by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method and were taken from OpenfMRI. In the obtained dataset, during fMRI scanning, German-speaking children with dyslexia (20), dysgraphia (16) and a control (22) group were instructed to read aloud normal words and pseudohomophones. First level general linear model (GLM) analysis was performed with the contrasts created in both tasks. As a result of this analysis, region of interest (ROI) analysis was performed by selecting the regions of the fusiform gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, precuneous and precentral gyrus, which include regions related to reading and in the literature. As a result of this study, among the selected ROI regions, there were differences between the groups in the fusiform gyrus, precuneous and right inferior frontal gyrus regions. The dysgraphia group showed significantly different interactions compared to the other two groups.