Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Bilateral ventral pathways support phonological awareness at reading onset in Spanish-speaking children
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
Moramay Ramos Flores1, Luis Concha Loyola1, M.Florencia Assaneo1; 1National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM
Learning to read is one of the most significant milestones in cognitive development. While the neural architecture of reading is well-documented in adults, the developmental pathways supporting reading acquisition remain poorly understood—especially in languages other than English. This study addresses this gap by investigating the cognitive and neuroanatomical foundations of early reading in monolingual Spanish-speaking children from Mexico. We assessed 61 children (ages 6 to 8 years; 41 early readers and 20 non-readers) using selected tasks from the Evaluación Neuropsicológica Infantil, a cognitive battery tailored for Latin American populations. Seven oral language tasks were administered: word repetition, non-word repetition, sentence repetition, picture naming, phonemic blending, and phoneme and word segmentation. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) revealed two components explaining 58% of the variability: a Phonological Awareness Component, with high loadings on phonemic blending, phoneme segmentation, and non-word repetition; and a General Verbal Skills Component, dominated by repetition and naming tasks. Early readers scored significantly higher than non-readers on both components (Phonological: p < 0.001; Verbal: p = 0.02), with a stronger effect in the Phonological Component (Phonological: r = 0.72; Verbal: r = 0.27). Diffusion-weighted MRI data were acquired from all participants, and probabilistic tractography was performed to reconstruct five bilateral white matter tracts associated with reading: the arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi (dorsal pathway) and the inferior longitudinal, fronto-occipital, and uncinate fasciculi (ventral pathway). PCA on tract-based dkiFA values revealed two components explaining 65.2% of the variability: a Bilateral Ventral Component with high loadings on bilateral inferior longitudinal, fronto-occipital, and uncinate fasciculi and a Bilateral Dorsal Component with predominant contributions from bilateral arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi. Cognitive-neuroanatomical associations revealed that the Phonological Cognitive Component positively correlated with the Ventral Anatomical Component (r = 0.41, FDR-corrected p = 0.003) and the Verbal Cognitive Component correlated with the Dorsal Anatomical Component (r = 0.33, FDR-corrected p = 0.019). Additionally, early readers exhibited significantly higher dkiFA values only in the Ventral Component (Ventral: p = 0.003, Dorsal Component: p = 0.45). To further explore this relationship, we conducted a mediation analysis including the Bilateral Ventral Component dkiFA as the independent variable, reading status (i.e., early reader or non-reader) as the dependent variable, and the Phonological Awareness Component score as the mediator. The direct effect (ADE) did not reach significance (ADE = 0.15, p = 0.34) suggesting that the relationship between reading status and white matter structure is completely mediated by phonological awareness. These results highlight a critical role of bilateral ventral white matter pathways in supporting early literacy development through phonological skills in Spanish-speaking children. This pattern may reflect the reduced reliance on lexical decoding in transparent orthographies. Furthermore, our findings challenge the prevailing assumption that phonological skills are exclusively supported by the left dorsal pathway. Together, these findings underscore the developmental flexibility of the brain’s reading network and provide compelling evidence that the neural mechanisms underlying reading acquisition are shaped by linguistic and educational context, rather than being universally fixed.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Reading