Emergence of the neural network for reading in five-year-old beginning readers of different levels of pre-literacy abilities: An fMRI study

Abstract

The present study traced the emergence of the neural circuits for reading in five-year-old children of diverse pre-literacy ability. In the fall and winter of kindergarten, children performed a oneback task with letter versus false font stimuli during fMRI scanning. At the start of kindergarten, children with on-track pre-literacy skills (OT) recruited bilateral temporo-parietal regions for the letter > false font comparison. In contrast, children at-risk for reading difficulty (AR) showed no differential activation in this region. Following 3 months of kindergarten and, for AR children, supplemental reading instruction, OT children showed left-lateralized activation in the temporoparietal region, whereas AR children showed bilateral activation and recruitment of frontal regions including the anterior cingulate cortex. These data suggest that typical reading development is associated with initial recruitment and subsequent disengagement of right hemisphere homologous regions while atypical reading development may be associated with compensatory recruitment of frontal regions.Over the past 20 years, a number of neuroimaging studies have examined the nature, development, dysfunction, and remediation of cortical circuits for reading. Studies of proficient, adult readers have identified three left-hemisphere regions that comprise a putative reading network. These include dorsal and ventral posterior regions and one anterior region (Pugh et al., 2000(Pugh et al., , 2001Schlaggar and McCandliss, 2007). The posterior dorsal region, located at and around the temporo-parietal junction, including the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and angular gyrus, has been hypothesized to be recruited for phonological processing (Church et al., 2008; Temple, © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Correspondence should be addressed to Yoshiko Yamada (yyamada@uoregon.edu). Courtney Stevens is now at the Department of Psychology, Willamette University. David Chard is now at the School of Education and Human Development, Southern Methodist University.Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptNeuroimage. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 August 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript2002) and the conversion of orthographical (visual) information to phonological (auditory) form (Pugh et al., 2000(Pugh et al., , 2001Shaywitz et al., 1998), which involves integration of multimodal information (Booth et al., 2002;van Atteveldt et al., 2004). The posterior ventral region, ...

Tracking the Roots of Reading Ability: White Matter Volume and Integrity Correlate with Phonological Awareness in Prereading and Early-Reading Kindergarten Children

“…In contrast, a study in children ages 7-11 found that greater FA in left arcuate fasciculus was associated with inferior phonological awareness (Yeatman et al, 2011). In a longitudinal study of children ages 7-15 examining the left arcuate fasciculus, superior readers initially had lower FA that increased across 3 years, whereas inferior readers initially had higher FA that decreased over 3 years (Yeatman et al, 2012).…”

“…Multiple studies have associated reading ability with white matter pathways, often with anterior-posterior fiber orientation, in the left temporoparietal region, such as the arcuate and other parts of the SLF Nagy et al, 2004;Niogi and McCandliss, 2006;Richards et al, 2008;Carter et al, 2009;Rimrodt et al, 2010;Frye et al, 2011;Yeatman et al, 2011). Other studies have found relations between reading ability and white matter with inferior-superior fiber orientation such as the anterior and superior corona radiata (Beaulieu et al, 2005;Niogi and McCandliss, 2006;Qiu et al, 2008;Odegard et al, 2009), although we did not observe this in our whole-brain analysis.…”

“…The left ILF is important for visual processing of words (Cohen et al, 2003;Yeatman et al, 2012) and damage to this tract can result in alexia (Epelbaum et al, 2008), presumably due to its role in connecting low-level visual regions to the visual word form area (a fusiform region involved in processing word/letter strings; . The SLF connects frontal regions to both the parietal cortices (via the SLFp) and to temporal cortices (via the arcuate fasciculus).…”

“…The SLF connects frontal regions to both the parietal cortices (via the SLFp) and to temporal cortices (via the arcuate fasciculus). In particular, FA measures of the left arcuate have been shown to correlate with phonological awareness in older readers (Yeatman et al, 2011(Yeatman et al, , 2012Vandermosten et al, 2012b) and an area including the left arcuate is the only region found to be significantly related to reading ability in a meta-analysis of studies relating whole-brain DWI measures and reading ability (Vandermosten et al, 2012a). A case study suggests that damage to the left SLF (including both the arcuate and SLFp) causes a profound deficit in learning to read, whereas damage to the right SLF causes visuospatial deficits (Rauschecker et al, 2009).…”

“…We examined two aspects of the left SLF (the arcuate fasciculus and SLFp, the frontoparietal aspect of the SLF) because of their importance in language and phonological awareness (Rauschecker et al, 2009;Yeatman et al, 2011;Vandermosten et al, 2012b), and the left inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) because of its involvement in visual word-form processing (Cohen et al, 2003;Yeatman et al, 2012). We investigated whether these tracts were related to PA, RAN, and letter knowledge skills in prereading and early reading kindergartners.…”