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Culture Shapes the Neural Functional Alteration and Its Development in Children With Dyslexia: A Cross‐Linguistic Meta‐Analysis

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Developmental Science

Published online on

Abstract

["Developmental Science, Volume 29, Issue 5, September 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nHow culture shapes brain functional alteration and its development remains poorly understood in dyslexia (DD). Hereby, we conducted a meta‐analysis comparing brain activation in children across Chinese (logographic), English (deep alphabetic), and German (shallow alphabetic) writing systems. A total of 48 studies involving 1554 participants were included, consisting of 695 typically developing controls and 859 individuals with DD. Results revealed universal neurobiological signatures of DD characterized by convergent hypoactivation in the left fusiform gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule across languages. Language‐specific reductions were identified: the left inferior frontal gyrus in Chinese, the left inferior temporal gyrus in English, and the left inferior parietal lobule in German. Developmental meta‐regressions demonstrated that in deep orthographic languages (English, Chinese), older children showed more convergent inferior temporal gyrus hypoactivation, suggesting atypical ventral stream maturation. Conversely, younger DD children exhibited more convergent hypoactivation in the superior temporal gyrus in alphabetic languages, indicating delayed dorsal stream development. These findings provided novel cross‐linguistic evidence of how neural atypicalities in DD differentially develop across writing systems, highlighting dynamic interactions between linguistic characteristics and neurodevelopmental plasticity in DD.\n"]