(30 lines of text) Reading disability (RD) is the most common neurodevelopmental disorder of childhood, estimated to affect 10- 15% of children of otherwise typically developing children. RD is a life-long disorder with significant difficulties persisting into adolescence and adulthood in several domains. Understanding the key environmental, cognitive and neurobiological bases of reading and disorders is fundamental to improve diagnostics and treatment of reading disabilities. Although much progress has been made on how the neural circuitry for reading depends on reading ability, quantitative analyses of how the brain structure and function underlies reading as a function of age and ability, and their interaction, are still lacking. A number of relevant findings originated from our lab and were supported by a series of NICHD grants. Although we have made significant progress on each of these grants in isolation, we strongly believe that making these datasets available to the scientific community allows for addressing questions that so far remained unanswered and this constitutes the key significance of this proposal. Across studies we used comparable measures at the level of brain and behavior, and given the rich range on age, ability and comorbidity status and the comparability of measures the potential scientific yield from combining these data sets into a unified database is strong. Important neurodevelopmental questions about how component processing in reading changes with experience and their associated brain pathways and how this differs in good and poor readers will be addressable. Moreover, an important longer-term strategic plan for which this project would be a foundation is to involve our collaborators from the U.S and other countries in building upon and extending this database to address reading development across orthographies. The proposed database contains environmental and background data, structural and functional (print/speech localizer tasks) brain measures across age and sensitive cognitive measures of code utilization in word reading, and many other language related measures, that will allow the user to chart key brain/behavior relations. We have collected over 1000 neuroimaging scans from 700 individuals across the age range from 5-30 years old, from preliterate to highly proficient readers. All data will be fully anonymized, stored in the industry standard Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) and uploaded, ultimately within a year after the grant's completion, on OpenNEURO. OpenNEURO is a free and open platform, approved by the NIH brain initiative (https://braininitiative.nih.gov/), for sharing in-vivo neuroimaging data. To increase awareness of the existence of this database, a white paper describing the richness and power of the data will be submitted after all data is uploaded. Additionally, we will inform other reading researcher using existing social media channels (e.g. Haskins twitter feed) and mail channels of conference attendees and other google mail lists.
(3 sentences) Understanding how the neurocognitive foundations of reading changes as a function of age and ability is fundamental to improve diagnostics and treatment of reading disabilities. Here we propose to make a uniquely rich environmental, multimodal brain imaging and cognitive database available for analysis by the scientific community. This database contains a large sample ranging in age from 5 to 30 with varied reading abilities and structural and functional neuroimaging measures and extensive cognitive assessments to allow characterization of components of reading ability, thus allowing for critical neurodevelopmental questions to be assessed with adequate power.
