Presentation
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Functional connectivity during story listening predicts later reading ability in middle childhood
Poster B6 in Poster Session B and Reception, Thursday, October 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Andrea N. Burgess1,2, Laurie E. Cutting1,2,3; 1Vanderbilt University, 2Vanderbilt Brain Institute, 3Vanderbilt Kennedy Center
Children’s early behavioral listening comprehension is highly predictive of their later reading abilities. However, less is known about the underlying neural mechanisms of these established behavioral relationships. To explore these associations, we collected fMRI data from 47 typically developing first-graders (age M = 7.5 years) and tracked their reading comprehension (RC) and word reading (WR) abilities into third grade. During the fMRI session, children listened to 1) coherent narrative and expository passages and 2) a scrambled passage baseline. Compared to the baseline, the listening task elicited expected language comprehension network activity. Next, we investigated the various functional connectivity associations between the language network and other brain regions using a seed-to-voxel connectivity analysis. We were particularly interested in how higher-level comprehension regions, such as the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG), were functionally connected to the rest of the brain. Activity in the left pMTG was anticorrelated with three default mode network (DMN) regions: the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), the right angular gyrus (AG), and the right middle frontal gyrus. Interestingly, these associations differentially predicted aspects of later reading ability. The anticorrelation between left pMTG and PCC predicted 18% of the variance in children’s third-grade RC ability, while the anticorrelation between left pMTG and right AG predicted 12% of the variance in children’s third-grade WR ability. We hypothesize that while listening to coherent speech, the way children’s brains activate core comprehension processing regions and inhibit task-irrelevant implicate their later reading abilities. Further analyses will elucidate how the modularity of these two networks may further explain reading development.
Topic Areas: Reading, Development