Associations between home literacy environment, brain white matter integrity and cognitive abilities in preschool‐age children

Abstract

AimCaregiver‐child reading is advocated by health organisations, citing cognitive and neurobiological benefits. The influence of home literacy environment (HLE) on brain structure prior to kindergarten has not previously been studied.MethodsPreschool‐age children completed assessments of language (EVT‐2, CTOPP‐2 Rapid Object Naming) and emergent literacy skills (Get Ready to Read!, The Reading House) followed by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Parents completed a survey of HLE (StimQ‐P2 READ), which has four subscales. DTI measures included axial diffusivity (AD), radial diffusivity (RD), mean diffusivity (MD) and fractional anisotropy (FA).ResultsForty‐seven children completed DTI (54 ± 7 months, range 36‐63; 27 girls). StimQ‐P2 READ scores correlated with higher EVT‐2, GRTR and TRH scores, controlling for age and gender (P < .01), and also with lower AD, RD and MD in tracts supporting language and literacy skills, controlling for age, gender and income (P < .05, family‐wise error corrected). Correlations were strongest for the Bookreading Quantity subscale, including with higher scores on all cognitive measures including CTOPP‐2, and also with higher FA in left‐lateralised literacy‐supporting tracts, controlling for age, gender and income.ConclusionMore nurturing home reading environment prior to kindergarten may stimulate brain development supporting language and literacy skills, reinforcing the need for further study.

Digital Parenting: Media Uses in Parenting Routines during the First Two Years of Life

“…On these occasions, they did so at the same time that a children's program was being broadcast, whereupon the child's attention was distracted, or the parents divided their attention between reading to the child and watching a program of their own choice. This practice is liable to lower the quality of parental mediation that is so essential at this age, while diminishing the possible benefits of reading stories out loud for promotion of children's linguistic and cognitive skills (Hutton et al, 2020).…”

The impact of the digital revolution on human brain and behavior: where do we stand?

“…Another area of interest is whether the development of processes related to language (semantics and grammar) is by any means affected by intensive digital media use. It is in this respect worrisome that early extensive screen use in preschoolers can have dramatic influences on language networks, as shown by sophisticated diffusion tensor MRI 24 , 25 ( Figure 1 ). This method provides estimates of white-matter integrity in the brain.…”

Myelin Water Imaging Demonstrates Lower Brain Myelination in Children and Adolescents With Poor Reading Ability

“…Longitudinal DTI studies of remediation in dyslexia have shown post-intervention reductions of RD in the left anterior centrum semiovale (Keller and Just, 2009) as well as the left/right corona radiata and posterior limb of the internal capsule (Gebauer et al, 2012), which may be consistent with increased myelination (Song et al, 2002(Song et al, , 2003. Other DTI studies reporting lower RD with better reading scores have also implicated that myelination is driving the white matter fractional anisotropy differences in the reading disabled cohorts in white matter regions such as left arcuate fasciculus (Vandermosten et al, 2012a;Thiebaut de Schotten et al, 2014;Christodoulou et al, 2017;Hutton et al, 2020), anterior and superior corona radiata (Frye et al, 2011), and left anterior limb of the internal capsule (Qiu et al, 2008). Notably, these regions are all consistent with our findings.…”

“…Regional white matter DTI has been correlated to language ability and pre-reading skills in younger ''pre-readers'' (Saygin et al, 2013;Vandermosten et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2017;Dodson et al, 2018;Vanderauwera et al, 2018;Walton et al, 2018;Ozernov-Palchik et al, 2019;Hutton et al, 2020), and even in infants with a family history of developmental dyslexia (Langer et al, 2017). Longitudinal DTI has shown that both baseline values and changes of diffusion parameters between scans predict future reading ability in healthy controls (Hoeft et al, 2011;Yeatman et al, 2012;Myers et al, 2014;Gullick and Booth, 2015;Takeuchi et al, 2016;Vanderauwera et al, 2017;Borchers et al, 2019;Bruckert et al, 2019;Lebel et al, 2019) and in neurodevelopmental disorders such as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (Treit et al, 2013).…”