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Performance on a lexical decision task was investigated in 12 English speaking adults with dyslexia. two age-matched comparison groups of unimpaired readers were included: 14 monolingual adults and 15 late proficient bilinguals. The aim of the study was to determine the timing of neural events with event-related potentials (ErPs) during lexical decision-making between individuals with dyslexia and unimpaired readers (both unilingual and bilingual). ErPs were calculated for posterior sites in the left and right hemispheres and the P1 and n170 components were compared between groups. Event-related EEG coherence (measuring the synchrony of neural events during lexical tasks both between and within cerebral hemispheres) was also calculated for seven electrode pairs (three pairs at symmetrical locations between hemispheres, and two pairs within each hemisphere). We chose to recruit two comparison groups of unimpaired readers to better clarify the findings resulting from the right hemisphere (EEG) coherence analysis. That is, both late-proficient bilinguals and adults with dyslexia are thought to rely on right hemisphere resources during reading. We hypothesized that those with dyslexia would show less within-hemisphere coherence and more between-hemisphere coherence than bilingual individuals. dyslexics had both lower amplitude and longer latency n170 activation than unimpaired readers, suggesting asynchronous neural activity. Dyslexics showed greater synchrony between hemispheres in gamma range frequencies whereas the bilingual group showed greater synchrony in the theta frequency band (both within and between hemispheres). This study demonstrates that individuals with developmental dyslexia have reduced amplitudes in the n170 and higher synchrony between hemispheres during a reading task. The differences may be due to an asynchrony of neuronal activity at the point where word form features are distinguished.

Sincronismo é um comportamento dinâmico que pode ser detectado na atividade dos neurônios que formam estruturas corticais, e essa atividade parece ser fundamental para a realização de processos relacionados a aprendizado, compreensão e reconhecimento. Estruturas corticais podem ser modeladas por redes de mapas acoplados. Nessas redes, a existência de solução síncrona é determinada pela equação que governa a atividade de cada mapa, pela topologia de acoplamento entre os mapas e pelos valores dos parâmetros. O enfoque deste trabalho é empregar redes de mapas acoplados voltados à detecção de simetria, e segmentação de imagens, via sincronismo. Synchronism is a dynamical behavior that can be found in the neural activity of cortical structures, and this behavior seems to be fundamental in learning, understanding and recognition processes. Cortical structures can be modeled by using coupled map lattices. In such lattices, the existence of synchronous solution is determined by the equation that rules the activity of each map, by the coupling topology among the maps, and by the parameter values. The goal of this work is to employ coupled map lattices in symmetry detection and image segmentation, via synchronism.