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Neural pathways of phonological and semantic processing and its relations to children’s reading skills

Poster E63 in Poster Session E, Saturday, October 8, 3:15 - 5:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall

Neelima Wagley¹, James Booth¹; ¹Vanderbilt University

Reading is facilitated by three main interconnected systems: orthography, phonology, and semantics. Children’s phonological abilities are strongly associated with successful word reading skills whereas semantic knowledge is strongly related to reading comprehension. Neuroimaging research on the development of this triad typically focuses on connectivity analyses between the occipito-temporal cortex and regions in the temporo-parietal or inferior frontal cortex. Correlations between network connectivity and reading ability are commonly used to characterize differences in children with and without reading difficulties. Yet, little is known about skill differences in functional connectivity between the temporo-parietal and frontal cortex, areas often associated with representational versus control aspects of the network. This study examines if engagement of the dorsal pathway (i.e., dIFG to pSTG) during phonological processing is related to word reading skill, whereas engagement of the ventral pathway (i.e., vIFG to pMTG) during semantic processing is related to reading comprehension skill. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral data from a publicly accessible dataset on OpenNeuro.org. The research questions, hypotheses, and analytical plan were pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. Forty-six children ages 8-15 years old were included in the final analyses. Participants completed two in-scanner reading tasks (word rhyming and word meaning) and two subtests of the WJ-III standardized assessment (letter-word identification and passage comprehension). In a series of registered and exploratory analyses, we correlated connectivity coefficients from generalized psychophysiological interactions (gPPI) with behavioral measures and used z-score to test the equality of two correlation coefficients. We observed small correlations of connectivity in the dIFG-pSTG pathway during phonological processing with word reading skill (r = 0.04 - 0.22) and with accuracy on the in-scanner word rhyming task (¬r = 0.16 - 0.19). There was little to no correlation of connectivity in the vIFG-pMTG pathway during semantic processing with reading comprehension skill (r = -0.05 - -0.14) or with accuracy on the in-scanner word meaning task (r = 0.03 - 0.04). In conclusion, results suggest that the engagement of the dorsal IFG to STG pathway for phonological processing is related to children’s word reading skills. There was no clear evidence to support the differentiation between the dorsal pathway’s relation to word reading and the ventral pathway’s relation to reading comprehension skills. We are extending this research to children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). We expect that predominantly oral DHH children may rely more on the dorsal phonological pathway, but bimodal children may rely more on the ventral semantic pathway for skilled reading.

Topic Areas: Reading, Signed Language and Gesture