Nguyen, Tin Q.; Harriott, Emily M.; Gao, Yurui; Burgess, Andrea N.; Cavender, Addie C.; Lou, Chenglin; Schilling, Kurt G.; Landman, Bennett A.; Gore, John C.; Cutting, Laurie E. (2025).听.听Imaging Neuroscience, 3.听
Skilled reading depends on several brain systems working together, including those for recognizing words, understanding meaning, and controlling attention and thinking. Scientists know a lot about the brain鈥檚 鈥渨iring鈥� for reading, but less about how these connections actually function. In this study, we looked at whether the left uncinate fasciculus, a white matter pathway connecting frontal and temporal brain regions and thought to be important for understanding meaning, affects how word recognition relates to reading comprehension. Fifty-three children and adolescents, ages 10 to 14, completed brain scans while resting and took tests of word recognition and reading comprehension. We measured how strongly the uncinate fasciculus was functionally connected to nearby gray matter regions involved in semantic memory, meaning-based knowledge, and cognitive control by examining correlations in resting brain activity signals. The results showed that stronger connectivity in this pathway was linked to a weaker reliance of reading comprehension on word recognition skill. In other words, children with stronger communication in this meaning-related brain network seemed better able to understand text even when word recognition was less strong. These findings suggest that semantic brain systems connected through the uncinate fasciculus may help readers use flexible, meaning-based strategies to support comprehension, and they highlight the importance of studying how white matter and gray matter work together in the developing reading brain.
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Fig. 1
Visualization of the analysis pipeline. (a) Pearson鈥檚 correlations between white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) time series were computed to create each participant鈥檚 functional connectivity matrix, with rows representing 48 WM bundles from the Eve atlas and columns representing 82 GM regions from the Brodmann鈥檚 Areas (BA) atlas. Reproduced with permission from Gao et al. (2021). (b) Functional connectivity indices between the uncinate fasciculus (UF) and GM regions were derived from the WM-GM functional connectivity matrices across participants. (c) Functional connectivity indices with the uncinate fasciculus were filtered by structurally linked GM regions of interest (ROIs). (d) Regression analysis was conducted to examine differences in WJ Passage Comprehension scores related to the interaction between WJ Basic Reading scores and UF-GM ROI functional connectivity (FC). (e) Multiple comparisons were corrected using False Discovery Rate (FDR). (f) Results surviving multiple comparison correction, including significant interaction effects and UF-GM ROI functional connectivity patterns, were visualized.