PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT
Literacy is associated with educational, socioeconomic, and health outcomes. A critical public health issue, low
literacy has been linked to over 230 billion dollars a year in health care costs. Developing proficient literacy is
dependent upon the ability to develop adequate reading skills, allowing for the transition from word reading to
reading for comprehension. The majority of theoretical models of reading have focused on only specific reading
skills, such as single-word reading. In contrast, the “Reading System Framework” provides the scaffolding to
investigate the link from word reading to reading comprehension, by way of lexical-semantic knowledge. The
long-term objectives of this proposal are to parse the mechanisms of typical and compensatory brain activation
for word reading to determine how these differences correspond to behavioral heterogeneity in children’s reading
comprehension. Decades of neuroimaging research have provided consistent evidence that skilled readers rely
on a complex, highly organized neurological system built during the process of learning to read. However,
compensatory brain activation during this learning process is not yet well established. Controversy surrounds
the question of whether reliance on compensatory brain regions at the single-word level facilitates or hinders
reading comprehension. Annually collected, longitudinal extant data from a functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI) word reading task, is complemented by standardized cognitive and reading assessments. The
fMRI task was chosen because it has been shown to reflect characteristics of individual’s reading network rather
than task stimulus demands. This is particularly important in the case of our longitudinal dataset, which contains
children spanning the reading ability continuum from good-to-poor readers. The current study aims to determine
and predict the intra-individual impact of neurobiological compensatory mechanisms on reading development.
In Aim 1, during the process of word reading, we examine the development of the left-hemisphere Visual Word
Form Area (VWFA) and its right-hemisphere compensatory homologue. In Aim 2, we investigate how the
continued use of compensatory brain regions impacts reading comprehension. Improved knowledge of typical
and compensatory brain development has the potential to reveal key biomarkers for increasing literacy.