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Specific brain structural changes following a phonological and a morphological intervention in Chinese children with RD

Poster A62 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port

Yu Wu¹, Guoyan Feng², Fan Cao¹; ¹The University of Hong Kong, ²Guangzhou Xinhua University

Objective: Prior research has focused on phonological intervention in children with reading disability (RD) in alphabetic languages; however, it has been poorly understood what intervention would be effective in Chinese children with RD. The present study investigated how brain structure and function change following a phonological intervention and a morphological intervention in Chinese children with RD. We also examined what factors predict responsiveness to each intervention by using demographic variables, reading skills and brain activation before the intervention. Methods: We recruited 68 Chinese children with RD (Age: 10-12 years) and randomly assigned them to a phonological intervention group (N = 23), a morphological intervention group (N = 24) and a waitlist group (N = 21). All children completed a battery of reading assessments and MRI scans before and after the intervention. Moreover, an age-matched group of typical readers (N = 19) were recruited as controls who did not receive intervention. A visual spelling judgment task and an auditory rhyming judgment task were applied during the fMRI scans. Results: Prior to intervention, children with RD exhibited lower activation than controls in the left IFG and bilateral supplementary motor areas during the auditory rhyming judgment task, and lower activation in the left fusiform gyrus and right SOG than controls in the visual spelling judgment task. However, no significant intervention-induced changes in brain activation were observed. Before intervention, typical readers had thicker bilateral fusiform cortex and thinner bilateral frontal and occipital cortex than children with RD. Repeated-measures ANCOVAs showed that the phonological and morphological intervention groups had greater improvement than the waitlist group on the phonological and morphological awareness tests respectively. Meanwhile, both the phonological and the morphological intervention groups showed greater improvement on character naming and Chinese reading fluency tests than the waitlist group. Compared with the waitlist group, the phonological intervention group had a greater increase in cortical thickness in the right precentral gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, MTG, STG, and angular gyrus, while the morphological intervention group showed greater cortical thickening in the bilateral SPL, left fusiform gyrus and left IFG than the other two groups. Greater cortical thickness at right STG and MTG before the phonological intervention predicted greater pre-to post-intervention progress of phonological awareness tests. Meanwhile, thicker cortex at right SPL and left fusiform gyrus prior to the morphological intervention predicted greater improvement on morphological awareness tests. Socio-economic status was negatively correlated with behavioral and neural changes following intervention in the phonological intervention group, suggesting that children from low SES family benefit more from the phonological intervention. No such relationship was found in the morphological intervention group. Conclusions: Both the phonological and the morphological intervention were effective in Chinese children with RD. Brain structural changes in different parts of the brain were caused by each intervention. Thicker cortex in the right SPL and the left fusiform gyrus is correlated with greater responsiveness to the morphological intervention, and thicker temporal cortex expects greater responsiveness to phonological intervention. These results provide important insights about reading intervention in Chinese children with RD.

Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, History of the Neurobiology of Language