Reading disorders are common in children and can impact academic success, mental health, and career prospects. Reading is supported by network of interconnected left hemisphere brain regions, including temporo-parietal, occipito-temporal, and inferior-frontal circuits. Poor readers often show hypoactivation and reduced gray matter volumes in this…

Children with dyslexia frequently also struggle with math. However, studies of reading disability (RD) rarely assess math skill, and the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying co-occurring reading and math disability (RD+MD) are not clear. The current study aimed to identify behavioral and neurocognitive factors associated with co-occurring MD among…

Auditory selective attention forms an important foundation of children's learning by enabling the prioritisation and encoding of relevant stimuli. It may also influence reading development, which relies on metalinguistic skills including the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. Reports of attentional impairments and speech…

Most behavioral interventions on reading disability (RD) have been developed in alphabetic languages and are phonologically-based. Chinese is a morpho-syllabic language in which each character represents a morpheme and a syllable. Therefore, phonologically-based interventions may not be most helpful in Chinese. In this study, we compared a…

Reading is a critical neurodevelopmental skill for school-aged children, which requires a distributed network of brain regions including the cerebellum. However, we do not know how functional connectivity between the cerebellum and other brain regions contributes to reading. Here we used resting-state functional connectivity to understand the…

Auditory processing of temporal information in speech is sustained by synchronized firing of neurons along the entire auditory pathway. In school-aged children and adults with dyslexia, neural synchronization deficits have been found at cortical levels of the auditory system, however, these deficits do not appear to be present in pre-reading…

Impaired abilities in multiple domains is common in children with learning difficulties. Co-occurrence of low reading and mathematical abilities (LRLM) appears in almost every second child with learning difficulties. However, little is known regarding the neural bases of this combination. Leveraging a unique and tightly controlled sample including…

There is an ongoing debate whether phonological deficits in dyslexics should be attributed to (a) less specified representations of speech sounds, like suggested by studies in young children with a familial risk for dyslexia, or (b) to an impaired access to these phonemic representations, as suggested by studies in adults with dyslexia. These…

Pediatric reading disorder (RD) is associated with an increased risk of anxiety symptoms, yet understudied are the neurobiological factors that might underlie anxiety in children with RD. Given the role of the amygdala in anxiety, we assessed resting state functional connectivity of amygdalar subregions in children with RD to identify functional…

The "automatic letter-sound integration hypothesis" (Blomert, [Blomert, L., 2011]) proposes that dyslexia results from a failure to fully integrate letters and speech sounds into automated audio-visual objects. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of English-speaking children with dyslexic difficulties (N = 13) and samples of…

Speakers convey meaning not only through words, but also through gestures. Although children are exposed to co-speech gestures from birth, we do not know how the developing brain comes to connect meaning conveyed in gesture with speech. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to address this question and scanned 8- to 11-year-old…