PURPOSE: To correlate auditory and metaphonological abilities and neuroimaging in students with developmental dyslexia, and to compare these findings to those obtained with students with good academic performance. METHODS: Twenty children participated in this study: ten with an interdisciplinary diagnostic of developmental dyslexia, and ten students with good academic performance. All subjects carried out audiologic, auditory processing and phonological awareness evaluations. The students with developmental dyslexia were submitted to imaging exam (SPECT). RESULTS: The results indicated a statistically significant difference between the hearing abilities of verbal sound sequences, contra and ipsilateral competing message, dichotic digits and alternate disyllables, and the metaphonological abilities of phonemic synthesis, segmentation, manipulation and transposition. Mesial temporal lobe hypoperfusion was evidenced among subjects with developmental dyslexia. CONCLUSION: The findings of the present study evidenced correlation between auditory memory tasks and syllabic and phonemic manipulation, and association between auditory and phonological abilities, suggesting that auditory processes interfere directly in the perception of acoustic, temporal and sequential aspects of sounds to form a stable phonological representation, and that this might be caused by the presence of blood flow changes on the temporal lobe.
Dyslexia; Auditory perception; Learning; Tomography, emission-computed, single-photon
