Taken together, functional brain scans and tests of reading skills strongly predict which children will have ongoing reading problems.
What's more, the two methods work better together than either one alone, according to new research in the June issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
Neuroscientists at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities think this double-barreled diagnostic can help identify at-risk readers as early as possible. That way, schools can step in before those children fail to learn to read or develop poor reading habits that might interfere with remediation, such as relying on memory for words rather than sounding out new ones. Early identification and systematic intervention can very often turn likely non-readers into readers, according to the study authors.
This study of 73 Pittsburgh-area children of ages 8 to 12, all identified as struggling readers, ran for a school year. At the start of the year, the researchers administered standard tests of early literacy skills, including word identification, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, efficiency, and phonological processing , this last a critical measure of how well children process the sounds of letters and letter combinations. The researchers also used functional MRIs (fMRIs) to depict how the children's brains, worked when they had to read two words and say whether they rhymed, a test of phonological awareness. To make the fMRI results more sensitive to differences among children, the authors further analyzed the images using a method called ,voxel-based morphometry, that uses the density of the brain's white and grey matter to zero in on activation patterns in specific parts of key brain regions.
At the end of the school year, the team, led by Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, of the Stanford University School of Medicine, tested the children's ability to decode text using the Word Attack subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test, a standardized measure of decoding. Hoeft's team then determined which test method (either or both) predicted reading skill more strongly. The model combining the behavioral and neuroimaging measures predicted future decoding significantly better than either of those methods alone.