Although there is growing evidence that developmental dyslexia is characterized by problems in basic sensory processes, there has been little work examining how information processing between the different sensory modalities is affected in this disorder. This is despite the fact that the development of reading and linguistic skills is an inherently cross-modal process, involving the integration of the visual and auditory components of the language representation. Based on the previous literature and our preliminary data, it is our hypothesis that dyslexics will indeed show a disorder in multisensory processing, which will manifest as an abnormally large window of time within which visual and auditory stimuli are bound into a unified percept. To test this hypothesis, and to examine the brain substrates that underlie these altered multisensory processes, we propose to conduct psychophysical and fMRI experiments. These experiments will use a multisensory temporal order judgment task in order to delineate the temporal window of multisensory integration in both dyslexic and normal reading subjects, as well as examining the differential patterns of brain activation in multisensory cortical regions during task performance. Together, the results of this study will serve to further our understanding of the neurophysiological bases of dyslexia. ? ? ?
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