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This study examined changes in white matter microstructure and grey matter volume, cortical thickness, and cortical surface area before and after reading intervention. Participants included 22 average readers and 13 dyslexic readers (8-9 years old in third grade); the dyslexic readers were enrolled in reading intervention programs at their elementary school. Participants completed scans of diffusion tensor imaging and T1-weighted MRI before and after 3 months of instruction. An a priori region of interest (ROI) analysis was used. Dyslexic readers, compared to average readers, showed higher mean diffusivity in white matter ROIs including bilateral inferior frontal, bilateral insula, left superior temporal, and right supramarginal gyri across time points. Dyslexic readers also had thicker cortex in left fusiform and bilateral supramarginal gyri; whereas, average readers had greater surface area in right fusiform across time. There were no significant changes in white or grey matter following intervention; however, mean diffusivity in the right hemisphere was associated with reading gains over time. White matter organization in the right hemisphere predicts reading changes, and dyslexic readers may have persistent differences in white and grey matter due to ongoing reading deficits., (© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Early intervention is known to reduce reading disabilities; however, treatment response is variable, and some students have persistent deficits that require intensive supports. This study examined the immediate and 1-year outcomes of an individualized and intensive reading program for third grade students, which was delivered throughout the school day for an average of 189 hr of instruction over 3 months. These students' performances were compared with two comparison groups, including poor readers who received small group supports and good readers who did not have additional reading instruction. The intensive group showed an improvement in word recognition and decoding fluency immediately after the program and 1 year later, and there was a decrease in significant reading impairments from 62% before intervention to 35% at follow-up. Furthermore, baseline reading, spelling, phonological awareness, and rapid naming skills were predictive of persistent reading deficits at a later time point. Although improvements in reading skills were shown, a significant gap between poor and good readers persisted in the third and fourth grades. This study illustrates the importance of a tertiary intensive reading program, but also the need for continuing supports., (© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

Children with poor reading skills have differences in brain function when compared to typically-developing readers, and there may also be changes in the brain following reading intervention. However, most functional imaging studies focus on phonological reading tasks with one level of task difficulty. The purpose of this study was to compare good and poor readers on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks of orthography (spelling) and phonology (rhyming) before and after 3 months of school-based intervention. These tasks were also modulated by task difficulty based on printed word frequency. The results showed that primarily left hemisphere regions were activated for the spelling and rhyming tasks, and poor readers showed a pattern of increased activation in bilateral inferior frontal, bilateral insula, right parietal, and left cerebellum following intervention. Activity in left pars triangularis and right parietal regions were associated with gains in decoding skills. Intervention effects appeared across blocks of easy and difficult words, except for the right parietal cortex. In this region, poor readers had greater activity on the easy word blocks after intervention, which indicates that there was increased recruitment of the right parietal cortex for relatively easy words. These results indicate that effects of intervention may be more evident on phonological tasks in comparison to orthographic tasks, and some of these effects may be modulated by relative task difficulty., (Crown Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Previous studies have reported compromised reading ability in children with amblyopia. Standardized psychoeducational test norms have not been used; therefore, the practical consequences of poor reading ability, such as eligibility for reading supports at school, have not been assessed. Furthermore, several studies have used atypical reading conditions such as monocular or distant viewing. It is also not clear how amblyopia treatment impacts reading ability. Thus, the goal of this study was to use standardized tests to compare binocular reading performance in children treated for amblyopia to that of a large normative sample, as well as to the types of control groups used in previous studies. Children treated for strabismic or anisometropic amblyopia (N = 14) were compared to children treated for strabismus without amblyopia (N = 12) and to children with healthy vision (N = 39). Visual acuity, stereoacuity, interocular suppression, intellectual functioning, oral single-word reading (TOWRE-2), and oral paragraph reading (GORT-5) were assessed. The control group showed significantly higher single-word reading accuracy than the amblyopia and strabismus groups. However, mean performance for all groups was within the average range of the normative sample. While mean scores were in the average range, six children (four amblyopia, two strabismus) performed below average on the single-word reading task; four of these children also showed below average paragraph reading. Reading scores were not correlated with visual acuity in the patient groups. The results raise the possibility that both strabismus and amblyopia can disrupt reading ability, even following successful treatment, to an extent that might benefit from reading supports at school., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The current study examined auditory processing deficits in dyslexia using a dichotic pitch stimulus and functional MRI. Cortical activation by the dichotic pitch task occurred in bilateral Heschl's gyri, right planum temporale, and right superior temporal sulcus. Adolescents with dyslexia, relative to age-matched controls, illustrated greater activity in left Heschl's gyrus for random noise, less activity in right Heschl's gyrus for all auditory conditions, and less activity in right superior temporal sulcus for a dichotic melody. Subsequent analyses showed that these group differences were attributable to dyslexic readers who performed poorly on the psychophysical task. Furthermore, behavioral performance on phonological reading was correlated to activity from dichotic conditions in right Heschl's gyrus and right superior temporal sulcus. It is postulated that these differences between reader groups is primarily due to a noise exclusion deficit shown previously in dyslexia. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)

There are some children who encounter unexpected reading difficulties in the fourth grade. This phenomenon has been described as late emerging reading disabilities (LERD). Using Grade 4 as a starting point, this study examined the reading development of 964 children between kindergarten and Grade 7. The results showed that 72.0% of children had typical reading performance in Grade 4, whereas there was 0.7% with poor word reading, 12.6% with poor reading comprehension, 2.5% with poor word reading and comprehension, and 12.2% with borderline performance. We also showed that there were similar proportions of children who had early versus late emerging reading difficulties; however, most of the late emerging poor readers recovered by Grade 7. Furthermore, our study showed that poor comprehenders showed poorer performance than typical readers on word reading, pseudoword decoding, and spelling between Grade 1 and Grade 7 and poorer performance on a working memory task in kindergarten. Overall, this study showed that most children recover from late emerging reading problems and that working memory may be an early indicator for reading comprehension difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]