Basic auditory dysfunction in dyslexia as demonstrated by brain activity measurements

Although the generality of dyslexia and its devastating effects on the indi vidual's life are widely acknowledged, its precursors and associated neural mechanisms are poorly understood. One of the two major competing views mai ntains that dyslexia is based primarily on a deficit in linguistic processi ng, whereas the other view suggests a more general processing deficit, one involving the perception of temporal information. Here we present evidence in favor of the latter view by showing that the neural discrimination of te mporal information within complex tone patterns fails in dyslexic adults. T his failure can be traced to early cortical mechanisms that process auditor y information independently of attention.