Despite reading being an essential and almost universal skill in the developed world, reading proficiency varies substantially from person to person. To study why, the fMRI field is beginning to turn from single-word or nonword reading tasks to naturalistic stimuli like connected text and listening to stories. To study reading development in children just beginning to read, listening to stories is an appropriate paradigm because speech perception and phonological processing are important for, and are predictors of, reading proficiency. Our study examined the relationship between behavioral reading-related skills and the neural response to listening to stories in the fMRI environment. Functional MRI were gathered in a 3T TIM-Trio scanner. During the fMRI scan, children aged approximately 7 years listened to professionally narrated common short stories and answered comprehension questions following the narration. Analyses of the data used inter-subject correlation (ISC), and representational similarity analysis (RSA). Our primary finding is that ISC reveals areas of increased synchrony in both high- and low-performing participants previously implicated in reading ability/disability. Of particular interest are that several previously identified brain regions (medial temporal gyrus (MTG), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), inferior temporal gyrus (ITG)) were found to “synchronize” across higher reading ability participants, while poor performers showed desynchronization from both proficient readers and other inefficient readers. Additionally, two regions (superior frontal gyrus (SFG) and another portion of ITG) were recruited by all participants, but their specific timecourse of activation depended on reading performance. These analyses support the idea that different brain regions involved in reading follow different developmental trajectories that correlate with reading proficiency on a spectrum rather than the usual dichotomy of poor readers versus strong readers.

尽管阅读在发达国家是一项基本且几乎普遍的技能，但阅读能力因人而异。为了研究其中的原因，功能磁共振成像领域开始从单个单词或非单词的阅读任务转向自然刺激，例如连接文本和听故事。为了研究刚开始阅读的儿童的阅读发展，听故事是一个合适的范例，因为言语感知和语音处理对于阅读能力很重要，并且是阅读能力的预测因素。我们的研究探讨了行为阅读相关技能与功能磁共振成像环境中听故事的神经反应之间的关系。功能性 MRI 是在 3T TIM-Trio 扫描仪中收集的。在功能磁共振成像扫描期间，大约 7 岁的儿童聆听专业叙述的常见短篇故事，并在叙述后回答理解问题。使用受试者间相关性（ISC）和代表性相似性分析（RSA）对数据进行分析。我们的主要发现是，ISC 揭示了先前与阅读能力/障碍有关的高表现和低表现参与者的同步性增强的区域。特别有趣的是，之前发现的几个大脑区域（内侧颞回（MTG）、额下回（IFG）、颞下回（ITG））被发现在阅读能力较高的参与者中“同步”，而表现不佳的参与者则表现出不同步既有熟练的读者，也有低效的读者。此外，所有参与者都招募了两个区域（额上回（SFG）和 ITG 的另一部分），但他们的具体激活时间取决于阅读表现。这些分析支持这样的观点，即参与阅读的不同大脑区域遵循不同的发展轨迹，这些轨迹与阅读能力的范围相关，而不是通常的阅读能力差与阅读能力强的二分法。