Children with dyslexia lack multiple specializations along the visual word-form (VWF) system.

Developmental dyslexia has been associated with a dysfunction of a brain region in the left inferior occipitotemporal cortex, called the "visual word-form area" (VWFA). In adult normal readers, the VWFA is specialized for print processing and sensitive to the orthographic familiarity of letter strings. However, it is still unclear whether these two levels of occipitotemporal specialization are affected in developmental dyslexia. Specifically, we investigated whether (a) these two levels of specialization are impaired in dyslexic children with only a few years of reading experience and (b) whether this impairment is confined to the left inferior occipitotemporal VWFA, or extends to adjacent …