106 Chapter 5 dyslexia are hindered in building a high-quality network by their phonological deficit; they show problems in the detection, segmentation, and manipulation of individual sounds in words (Beitchman & Young, 1997). These abilities are, at least to a large extent, dependent on the quality of the underlying phonological representations (Goswami, 2000), which can be underspecified and sometimes missing (Conrad, 2008; Göbel & Snowling, 2010). As a consequence, children may experience difficulties in reading words accurately and fluently and in spelling words correctly (Lyon et al., 2003). Multiple neuroimaging studies found that children with dyslexia show relative underactivation in the posterior regions and relative overactivation in the anterior regions during rhyme decision tasks of both real words and pseudowords (e.g., Hoeft et al., 2007; Shaywitz et al., 2003). The posterior region of the brain is known for the integration of visual codes, phonological structures and the phonological retrieval that enables fluent reading (Price & Friston, 1997) and has found to be associatedwith the phonological deficit of children with dyslexia (Brunswick et al., 1999). The anterior region of the brain is known for different aspects of language processing, making efficient processing of language possible (Bookheimer, 2002), such as the encoding of new memories, the retrieval and selection of declarative and procedural knowledge (Buckner et al., 2001; Ullman, 2004), and for memorization of verbal information (Smith & Jonides, 1999). Based on neuroimaging studies, Kearns and colleagues (2019) as well as Hoeft and colleagues (2011) suggested that children with dyslexia may use different pathways to read as compared to typically developing peers in an attempt to overcome dysfunctions in the posterior regions. The overactivation in the anterior regions could point to a compensation for the weak relationship between phonological and orthographic representations. One possible source of compensation associated with this region is the ability to learn and remember verbally presented information. Verbal learning is a way of expanding the phonological representations and thus the lexical specificity of words. As verbal learning adds new phonological information to the child’s lexicon (and therefore more specificity and redundancy) it could facilitate reading and spelling (in line with the lexical restructuring hypothesis by Metsala & Walley (2008)). Children who learn verbal information more easily may be able to form more and better specified semantic and phonological representations, which helps to recognize words while reading parts of it. Better ability to learn verbal information may thus indirectly compensate for the lack of strong and bi-directional phonological and orthographic representations. In other words, the ability to learn and remember words could expand the lexical quality as described by Perfetti (2007).
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