Abstract
A child’s school achievement is influenced by environmental factors. The environmental factors, when represented by socio-economic status (SES) of the family, have been demonstrated to be related to the reading skills of a child. The neural correlates of the relation between SES and reading have been less thoroughly investigated. The present study expands current research by exploring the relation between SES, quantified by paternal educational level, reading of the offspring and the structure of white matter pathways in the left hemisphere as derived from DTI-based tractography analyses. Therefore, three dorsal white matter pathways, i.e. the long, anterior and posterior segments of the arcuate fasciculus (AF), and three ventral white matter pathways, i.e. the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and the uncinate fasciculus (UF), were manually dissected in the left hemisphere of 34 adolescents with a wide range of reading skills. The results demonstrated a relation between word reading, SES quantified by paternal educational level, and fractional anisotropy (FA) within the left dorsal AF segment and the left ventral UF. Thus, the present study proposes a relationship between paternal educational level and a specific white matter pathway that is important for reading, aiming to guide future research that can determine processes underlying this relationship.
Highlights
The environment in which a child grows up is known to substantially influence a child’s school achievement [1]
As indicated in the methods section, statistical analyses were restricted to paternal educational level, given that more data were missing for the mothers because more fathers were diagnosed with dyslexia compared to the mothers, and the educational level of the mothers was not distributed
The present study investigated the relation between socio-economic status (SES), reading and structural organization of dorsal and ventral white matter pathways of the left hemispherical reading network
Summary
The environment in which a child grows up is known to substantially influence a child’s school achievement [1]. Parental characteristics are among the important factors influencing a child’s environment [2,3]. These parental-driven environmental characteristics can be represented by parental socio-economic status (SES). Quantification of SES is most commonly based on parental educational level, family income and parental occupation [4,5].
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