Turesky Ted K, Escalante Elizabeth, Loh Megan, Gaab Nadine
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA.
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
bioRxiv. 2025 Apr 6:2024.06.29.601366. doi: 10.1101/2024.06.29.601366.
Reading is one of the most complex skills that we utilize daily, and it involves the early development and interaction of various lower-level subskills, including phonological processing and oral language. These subskills recruit brain structures, which begin to develop long before the skill manifests and exhibit rapid development during infancy. However, how longitudinal trajectories of early brain development in these structures support long-term acquisition of literacy subskills and subsequent reading is unclear. Children underwent structural and diffusion MRI scanning at multiple timepoints between infancy and second grade and were tested for literacy subskills in preschool and decoding and word reading in early elementary school. We developed and implemented a reproducible pipeline to generate longitudinal trajectories of early brain development to examine associations between these trajectories and literacy (sub)skills. Furthermore, we examined whether familial risk of reading difficulty and children's home literacy environments, two common literacy-related covariates, influenced those trajectories. Results showed that individual differences in curve features (e.g., intercepts and slopes) for longitudinal trajectories of volumetric, surface-based, and white matter organization measures were linked directly to phonological processing and indirectly to first-grade decoding and word reading skills via phonological processing. Altogether, these findings suggest that the brain bases of phonological processing, previously identified as the strongest behavioral predictor of reading and decoding skills, may already begin to develop by birth but undergo further refinement between infancy and preschool. The present study underscores the importance of considering academic skill acquisition from the very beginning of life.
阅读是我们日常运用的最复杂技能之一，它涉及到各种较低层次子技能的早期发展与相互作用，包括语音处理和口语。这些子技能会调用大脑结构，而这些结构在该技能显现之前很久就开始发育，并在婴儿期呈现快速发展。然而，这些结构中早期大脑发育的纵向轨迹如何支持识字子技能的长期习得及后续阅读尚不清楚。研究人员在婴儿期至二年级的多个时间点对儿童进行了结构和扩散磁共振成像扫描，并在学龄前对他们的识字子技能进行了测试，在小学低年级对他们的解码和单词阅读能力进行了测试。我们开发并实施了一个可重复的流程来生成早期大脑发育的纵向轨迹，以检验这些轨迹与识字（子）技能之间的关联。此外，我们还研究了阅读困难的家族风险和儿童的家庭识字环境这两个常见的与识字相关的协变量是否会影响这些轨迹。结果表明，体积、基于表面和白质组织测量的纵向轨迹的曲线特征（如截距和斜率）的个体差异直接与语音处理相关，并通过语音处理间接与一年级的解码和单词阅读技能相关。总之，这些发现表明，语音处理的脑基础，先前被确定为阅读和解码技能最强的行为预测指标，可能在出生时就已开始发育，但在婴儿期和学龄前会进一步完善。本研究强调了从生命最初就考虑学术技能习得的重要性。
