Determinants of phenotypes within the word reading (dis)ability population: The impact of diverse language experiences and child attributes on emerging reading skills

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This LD Hub P20 renewal entitled, “Determinants of phenotypes within the word reading (dis)ability population: The impact of diverse language experiences and child attributes on emerging reading skills” responds to the NICHD invitation for LD Innovation Hubs, FOA’s (RFA-HD-22-005). The overarching goal of this LD Hub is to continue to lay the foundation for a generation of research that situates educational practices in a novel theory of individual word reading development. The knowledge and product generated from this Hub will be used to inform future behavioral, computational, and neurobiological studies examining the development of word reading skills and will be used to align theories describing the relations between child- and word-attributes that explain individual differences in word reading more closely with the educational challenges confronting educators of typically developing (TD) and more specifically children with reading disability (RD), while also expanding our understanding of where important differences exist in under-represented populations in RD research. The proposal addresses the second priority of the RFA; namely “pushing innovation”, by exploring new and complex behavioral phenotypes of RD that vary as a function of child experience and cognitive ability across linguistically diverse samples of learners. Our LD Hub adopts an interdisciplinary approach to developing the foundational and translational research needed to better understand the general development of item-level word reading skill in a large portion of the English language, explore important differences in word reading development across TD and RD populations with a focus on important historically under-represented populations, and examine the interactions between child- and word-attributes that explain individual differences in word reading development. The overall specific aims for the Hub include: (1) expand our understanding of the basic mechanisms undergirding word reading development in English; (2) increase the scientific infrastructure for research on reading disability by establishing a publicly available database (developmental English Lexicon Project) incorporating all of the data collected in the research project; (3) maintain and expand the Hub’s multidisciplinary team of experienced and early researchers with expertise spanning educational, computational, and neurobiological research; and (4) strengthen the scientific workforce by providing career enhancing opportunities for early career scientist and by promoting its diversity through the participation of underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities. In achieving these aims, we will create a research team, a body of empirical knowledge, and a theoretical framework setting the stage for (i) better educational practices, particularly related to RD; (ii) translational research on related topics such as literacy acquisition by English Language Learners (ELL) and speakers of dialects, and second-language acquisition; and (iii) a new generation of theories embracing individual differences and strongly tied to the neurobiological bases of learning.