An interesting article today in Science Daily notes a study from Carnegie Mellon University published in the August issue of the journal, Neuropsychologica. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging have found that "remedial instruction resulted in an increase in brain activity in several cortical regions associated with reading, and that neural gains became further solidified during the year following instruction."
The Science Daily article goes on to point out that the common perception that dyslexia is due to visual perceptual difficulties – for instance, confusion between the letters "p" and "d" – is true in only about 10% of the cases. "The most common cause, accounting for more than 70 percent of dyslexia, is a difficulty in relating the visual form of a letter to its sound, which is not a straightforward process in the English language. The same parietotemporal areas of the brain that showed increased activity following instruction are centrally involved in this sound-based processing."
The Center's Director, Marcel Just, suggests that "[t]he research's implications may reach far beyond improving literacy skills. Just noted that the brain's capacity to adapt as the result of targeted instruction has the potential to influence the remedial learning process in other subject areas, as well."