Using Cognitive Neuroscience to Predict Dyslexia among Kindergarden Children

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的长期目标是了解发展性阅读障碍（最常见的特定学习障碍之一）的大脑基础，并促进阅读障碍的早期识别，以便早期干预可以最大限度地减少阅读障碍对学生成绩，自我感知和长期生活结果的负面影响。阅读障碍通常是由于语音意识（操纵语言语音的能力）的缺陷导致的，这种缺陷先于并损害了阅读学习，但这种缺陷的根本原因尚未确定。神经影像学方法，包括事件相关电位（ERPs），功能性磁共振成像（fMRI），和扩散张量成像（DTI），已确定在阅读障碍儿童的大脑差异。然而，几乎所有的这些研究都涉及到年龄较大的儿童，他们表现出阅读失败，因此有两个基本问题仍然没有答案。首先，什么样的大脑差异会导致阅读障碍（即，在一年级的阅读教学之前，5岁的幼儿就存在这种现象）？第二，大脑测量是否能显著提高我们的预测能力，即哪些在幼儿园有阅读障碍风险的阅读前儿童实际上会在二年级时成为阅读障碍？为了回答这些问题，我们提出了一项纵向研究，包括：（1）筛选1000名阅读前障碍者，以确定120名儿童有阅读障碍的风险和60名儿童没有风险;（2）对这180名阅读前障碍者进行MRI，fMRI，DTI和ERP实验，以确定有阅读障碍风险与无阅读障碍风险儿童的大脑差异;（3）纵向跟踪这些儿童的语言和阅读发展，以发现哪些高危儿童在二年级末实际发展为阅读障碍;以及（4）使用各种统计方法，包括多元统计，为了提高预读的准确性，阅读障碍者可以被识别为处于阅读障碍的真正风险中。这项研究是新颖的，在其多模式成像与幼儿，其纵向随访，其翻译健康的目的，开发方法，以准确地识别幼儿阅读障碍的真正风险，使这些儿童可以提供早期干预，以尽量减少他们的学习困难。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of this research is to understand the brain basis of developmental dyslexia, one of the most common specific learning disabilities, and to advance early identification of dyslexia so that early intervention can minimize the documented negative influence of dyslexia on student achievement, self-perception, and long-term life outcomes. Dyslexia typically results from a deficit in phonological awareness (the ability to manipulate speech sounds of language) that precedes and impairs learning to read, but the underlying cause of this deficit has not yet been determined. Neuroimaging methods, including event-related potentials (ERPs), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), have identified brain differences in children with dyslexia. Nearly all of these studies, however, involve older children with demonstrated reading failure, so two essential questions remain unanswered. First, what brain differences lead to dyslexia (i.e., are present in 5-year-old kindergartners prior to reading instruction in the 1st grade)? Second, can brain measures significantly enhance our ability to predict which pre- reading children at risk for dyslexia in kindergarten actually go on to become dyslexic by second grade? To answer these questions, we propose a longitudinal study that involves (1) screening 1000 pre-reading kindergartners to identify 120 children at risk for dyslexia and 60 children not at risk; (2) perform MRI, fMRI, DTI, and ERP experiments in these 180 kindergartners to identify brain differences in children with versus without risk for dyslexia; (3) longitudinally follow the language and reading development of these children to discover which at-risk children actually progress to dyslexia at the end of 2nd grade; and (4) use various statistical methods, including multivariate statistics, to improve the accuracy with pre-reading kindergartners can be identified as being at true risk for dyslexia. This study is novel in its multimodal imaging with young children, its longitudinal follow-up, and its translational health aim of developing methods to accurately identify young children at true risk for dyslexia so that such children can be offered early intervention to minimize their learning difficulties.