Children with dyslexia and right parietal lobe dysfunction: event-related potentials in response to words and pseudowords.

Hari and Renvall (Trends Cogn. Sci., 5 (2001) 525) proposed that dyslexic children suffer from sluggish attention deployment due to a right parietal lobe dysfunction. To examine this hypothesis, good and poor readers (12, 11-year-old boys in each group) had to read familiar words (low attentional demand) and pseudowords (high attentional demand). The amplitude of the event-related potential at around 100 ms post-stimulus (N1) in response to words and pseudowords was used as measure of attention deployment. Consistent with the attention deficit/right parietal lobe dysfunction hypothesis, poor readers showed lower N1 amplitudes in response to pseudowords, but not in response to words at central sites of the right hemisphere. However, poor readers also showed lower N1 amplitudes to both words and pseudowords at left frontal sites suggestive of an early deficit in activating phonological codes.