The development of brain functional connectome during text reading

Abstract

Reading is an important skill for human beings to obtain information, whose acquisition is a major learning task for children. Especially, compared with single word reading, text reading requires an integration of multiple cognitive processes, which makes its underlying neural developmental mechanism not only extremely complicated but also remained poorly understood. Employing the graph theory analysis method, the present study explored the development of brain in the context of story reading from the perspective of connectomics. Forty-two primary school students and thirty-two adults read the stories in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. We found that compared with children, adults had increased connectivity strength, nodal degree, and modular interactions for vision-related and semantics-related brain regions while decreased connectivity strength, nodal degree, and modular interactions for phonology-related brain regions. Brain-behavior association analysis suggested that the transmission to vision-related brain circuits would enhance the reading performance in adults, whereas phonology-related brain circuits played important roles in children’s reading before they develop into fluent readers. Collectivity, we highlight a shift from reliance on phonology-related networks to semantics-related and vision-related networks with age for text reading, which provides insights into the underlying neural signature of developmental cognitive mechanisms.

Detection of deviance in Japanese kanji compound words

“…Chinese characters that are also used in Japanese writing as kanji represent meaning in addition to pronunciation. This difference indeed seems reflected by the developmental shift of the areas activated by reading from the auditory network in comparison to the visual network ( Zhou et al, 2021 ). The stimulation may be more effective when it is provided to the areas outside of the auditory association cortices for those who write using Chinese characters.…”

Functional brain networks underlying the interaction between central and peripheral processes involved in Chinese handwriting in children and adults

“…Thus, the involvement of the DMN in the frequency effect may arise from the level of semantic memory (Almeida et al, 2007;Bonin & Fayol, 2002). Previous studies have shown that adults exhibit greater FC between visual-related and semantic-related brain regions and decreased connectivity in phonological information networks when reading in Chinese (Zhou et al, 2021). Therefore, the link between the frequency effect and connectivity within the DMN in adults is not surprising because the semantic activation of characters is more efficient and sufficient in adults than in children, which leads to the high possibility that semantic information cascades into motor processes involved in handwriting.…”

Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading

“…Beginning readers often rely extensively on letter‐to‐sound processing, but with experience they learn to integrate visual and semantic processing (Zhou et al., 2021). As they gain experience with written words, readers can retrieve word meanings more directly and establish brain systems for mapping whole words to meaning (Eddy et al., 2014).…”