[Neuropsychologic contribution to dyslexia research. A review of important explanatory models and findings].

Since in a substantial proportion of reading-disabled children constitutional factors appear to play an important pathogenetic role, major contributions to a better understanding of dyslexia have long come from the fields of neuropsychology and behavioral neurology. In this overview an attempt is made to describe the most important hypotheses and models on which neuropsychological research on this problem has been based. The first section is devoted to a discussion of findings on acquisition of reading and spelling skills by brain-damaged children and on the effect of the localization of central nervous system lesions on reading disorders in children. Classic neurological disorders are seen in only a small proportion of children with reading retardation, however. Therefore the second section comprises a discussion of various hypotheses that have been developed to explain the particular performance profiles seen in children with dyslexia but with no evidence of brain damage, i.e. in those children who can be said to have a developmental disorder. It is emphasized that dyslexia is probably not a uniform syndrome but that rather different subgroups of reading-disabled children can be identified.