Abstract
Primary education is the incubator for learning academic skills that help children to become a literate, communicative, and independent person. Over this learning period, nonlinear and regional changes in the brain occur, but how these changes relate to academic performance, such as reading ability, is still unclear. In the current study, we analyzed longitudinal T1 MRI data of 41 children in order to investigate typical cortical development during the early reading stage (end of kindergarten–end of grade 2) and advanced reading stage (end of grade 2–middle of grade 5), and to detect putative deviant trajectories in children with dyslexia. The structural brain change was quantified with a reliable measure that directly calculates the local morphological differences between brain images of two time points, while considering the global head growth. When applying this measure to investigate typical cortical development, we observed that left temporal and temporoparietal regions belonging to the reading network exhibited an increase during the early reading stage and stabilized during the advanced reading stage. This suggests that the natural plasticity window for reading is within the first years of primary school, hence earlier than the typical period for reading intervention. Concerning neurotrajectories in children with dyslexia compared to typical readers, we observed no differences in gray matter development of the left reading network, but we found different neurotrajectories in right IFG opercularis (during the early reading stage) and in right isthmus cingulate (during the advanced reading stage), which could reflect compensatory neural mechanisms.
Highlights
It is still unclear how the cortical regions are shaped during primary school years and how their development would differ in children with learning difficulties, such as children affected by developmental dyslexia
We examined the cortical development throughout primary school and aimed to identify the potential atypical patterns related to developmental dyslexia
Our results showed that different neural trajectories were found in the right pars opercularis and the right isthmus cingulate gyri, but within the left hemispheric reading network, structural development was not different between reading groups
Summary
Primary school years are very important for brain development since this time period is crucial for acquiring essential academic skills, such as reading and writing (Barquero, Davis, & Cutting, 2014). The number of longitudinal brain imaging studies during this period is limited and no information is available on cortical regional changes during specific stages of reading development It is still unclear how the cortical regions are shaped during primary school years and how their development would differ in children with learning difficulties, such as children affected by developmental dyslexia (i.e., severe and persistent difficulties with reading and/or writing). Solid methodological approaches for reliably assessing structural changes from longitudinal pediatric data at the individual level are lacking For this purpose, we applied a reliable dynamic brain measure adapted to pediatric data in order to investigate the cortical development during early and advanced stages of reading development in children with typical reading skills and children with dyslexia
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