Literacy skills are fundamental to children’s personal and professional growth in our society. Yet, children vary greatly in their reading development throughout the school years (Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). Because such individual differences can be observed as early as in the preschool years, it has been argued that the home literacy environment (HLE) may play an important role in scaffolding early literacy skills. The Home Literacy Model (Sénéchal, 2006, Sénéchal & Lefevre, 2002) makes the distinction between informal and formal home literacy experiences, which could each relate differently to children’s literacy skills. Notably, informal literacy experiences (e.g., frequency of shared book reading or literacy resources at home) have been found to contribute to vocabulary skills. (Manolitsis, Georgiou, & Parrila, 2011; Sénéchal, 2006, Torppa et al., 2007). In contrast, formal literacy experiences (e.g., explicit reading instructions) have been related to children’s phonological awareness, letter knowledge or early reading skills. It has also been suggested that the relation between HLE and literacy skills depend on HLE complexity, with advanced formal practices being uniquely related to vocabulary skills (Skwarchuk et al. 2014). While most prior studies have assessed children’s HLE through indirect parental questionnaires, some have also used more direct measures of parental talk. Both amount and quality of adult speech addressed to children have been found to be related to children’s language skills (Hoff, 2003; Huttenlocher, Waterfall, Vasilyeva, Vevea, & Hedges, 2010; Rowe, 2012; Schwab & Lew-Williams, 2016). The quality of language input has also been assessed through vocabulary diversity or number of decontextualized utterances (Rowe et al. 2012) or by the number of adult-child conversational turns (Romeo et al. 2018). Thus, there is considerable variation in the way HLE are analyzed. This raises questions about analytical flexibility and makes it difficult to distinguish exploratory from confirmatory results. Furthermore, the brain mechanisms mediating the relation between HLE and reading performance remain poorly understood. A first line of evidence comes from studies investigating how disparities in socio-economic status (as a distal measure measure for the quality of the HLE) may relate to children’s brain regions typically associated with literacy, notably in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Raizada et al., 2008). Neuroimaging studies that have more explicitly assessed the HLE also suggest that quality of adult-child literacy interactions at home affects both structure and function of left perisylvian areas (particularly at the level of the left IFG) (Romeo et al. 2018; Su et al. 2020, Powers et al. 2016). These previous studies, however, only provide indirect evidence that the HLE relates to brain regions associated with reading in children. This is because studies to date have either assessed structural (not functional) properties of the brain of reading children (Merz et al. 2020, Su et al. 2020) or have only measured brain activity of pre-reading children using auditory tasks that did not involve word decoding per se (Hutton et al. 2017; Romeo et al. 2018; Powers et al. 2016). In the present project, we aim to explore the relation between the HLE of children from 5 to 6 and both (i) literacy performance (phonological awareness and vocabulary) and (ii) fMRI activity associated with reading letters.