Nurturing the reading brain: home literacy practices are associated with children's neural response to printed words through vocabulary skills

Home reading environment, sociometric and demographic factors associated with dyslexia in primary school students in China: A case-control study

Background

Developmental dyslexia (DD) has been generally recognized as a multifactorial psychological disorder in recent decades. However, studies on reading and learning environment, social and demographic factors affecting Chinese developmental dyslexia (DD) are still scarce in China. This study aims to explore multidimensional home influencing factors associated with DD before and after birth.

Methods

A total of 60 dyslexic and 252 normal elementary school students graded 2-5 were recruited in Shantou, China. The Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression model was used for the social and demographic variables screening. Odds ratios (ORs) with 95 % confidence intervals (CIs) for associations between DD and related factors were estimated by multivariate logistic regression models.

Results

Through LASSO regression, we ultimately identified 13 key variables, including maternal education level and family monthly income, among others. The logistic regression analyses showed that the risk of DD was higher in children with lower maternal education levels. Divergent parenting styles may be a risk factor for developing DD as opposed to consistent parenting styles (OR = 4.93, 95%CI: 1.11-21.91). Children whose mothers suffered from malnutrition during pregnancy were more likely to develop DD (OR = 10.31, 95%CI: 1.84-37.86), as well as exposure to second-hand smoking at home every day (OR = 5.33, 95%CI: 1.52-18.66). Interestingly, children's active reading (OR = 0.26, 95%CI: 0.08-0.84; OR = 0.17, 95%CI: 0.04-0.76 for "sometimes" and "often" compared to none, respectively), children having extracurricular reading fairy tale books (OR = 0.37, 95%CI: 0.15-0.90), and children having extracurricular reading composition books (OR = 0.25, 95%CI: 0.09-0.69) were significant protective factors for DD.

Conclusions

Home reading environment, several educational, sociometric and demographic factors may influence the development of dyslexia. We should pay attention to these factors on the development of dyslexia, so as to provide the well social and familial environment to ensure the healthy development of children.

Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu

Alloparenting, wherein people provide care to children who are not their biological offspring, is a key aspect of human child-rearing. In the Pacific, many children are adopted or fostered by custodial alloparents even when both biological parents are still alive. From a behavioral ecology perspective, such behaviors are puzzling: why parent someone else's child at your expense? Furthermore, little is known about how these arrangements are made in Pacific Islander societies today, who provides care, and what kinds of outcomes fostered children experience. A better understanding of these proximate factors may help reveal the ultimate drivers behind custodial alloparenting. Here, we report findings from a survey carried out with the caregivers of 282 children in rural areas of Vanuatu, an island nation in Melanesia. Most fostered and adopted children lived with relatives such as aunts, uncles, and grandparents (87.5%) rather than unrelated caregivers, with a strong preference for maternal kin. The most common reasons for these arrangements were that the parents had separated (16.7%), were engaging in labor migration (27.1%), or a combination of both (27.1%). Results for investment in children's education and their educational outcomes were mixed, although children removed from crisis situations did more poorly than children removed for aspirational reasons. Our findings suggest that custodial alloparenting helps families adapt to socioeconomic transitions and changing marriage practices. Outcomes may depend on a range of factors, such as the reason children were transferred out of the natal home to begin with.

Cortical representations of numbers and nonsymbolic quantities expand and segregate in children from 5 to 8 years of age

Number symbols, such as Arabic numerals, are cultural inventions that have transformed human mathematical skills. Although their acquisition is at the core of early elementary education in children, it remains unknown how the neural representations of numerals emerge during that period. It is also unclear whether these relate to an ontogenetically earlier sense of approximate quantity. Here, we used multivariate fMRI adaptation coupled with within- and between-format machine learning to probe the cortical representations of Arabic numerals and approximate nonsymbolic quantity in 89 children either at the beginning (age 5) or four years into formal education (age 8). Although the cortical representations of both numerals and nonsymbolic quantities expanded from age 5 to age 8, these representations also segregated with learning and development. Specifically, a format-independent neural representation of quantity was found in the right parietal cortex, but only for 5-year-olds. These results are consistent with the so-called symbolic estrangement hypothesis, which argues that the relation between symbolic and nonsymbolic quantity weakens with exposure to formal mathematics in children.

Prior home learning environment is associated with adaptation to homeschooling during COVID lockdown

The COVID-19 crisis in 2020 led to exceptional measures to contain the spread of the virus. In France as in many countries around the world, the government ordered a lockdown with school closure for several weeks. A growing number of studies suggest that family socio-economic status might be an important predictor of how families adapted to homeschooling during lockdown. However, socio-economic status is a distal factor that does not necessarily inform on the specific characteristics of the home learning environment that may more directly influence parental adaptation to homeschooling during lockdown. Here we aimed to examine how parental adaptation to homeschooling during lockdown was influenced by prior parental attitudes and expectations towards academic learning, as well as prior familiarity with literacy and numeracy activities at home. The present study involves 52 families who participated in a study about the home learning environment in 2018. At that time, parents completed an extensive questionnaire assessing their beliefs and attitudes towards academic learning and the frequency of literacy and numeracy activities are home. At the end of the first 2020 French lockdown, we again asked the same parents to complete a questionnaire, this time assessing homeschooling conditions during lockdown as well as parental confidence towards academic domains. Over and above a range of background variables, correlation analyses revealed that parental expectations towards academic learning as well as frequency of prior shared activities were related to daily homeschooling time during lockdown. Both parental attitudes and expectations towards numeracy and literacy were also related to parental confidence in homeschooling. Our results suggest that several aspects of the home learning environment may have influenced how families adapted to homeschooling during the 2020 COVID lockdown.