The Relation of Home Literacy Environment to Brain Specialization and Sensitivity for Phonological and Semantic Processing of Spoken Words.

The younger group was small (33 children) compared with the older group (76), which limits what can be concluded about the 5 to 6 year olds. Reading environment was measured with a single parent-report question in each group, and the questions were slightly different for the two age groups, so the quality of shared reading was never captured and the two groups could not be compared statistically with each other. Most of the significant patterns came from exploratory analyses run at a lenient threshold, which the authors themselves describe as weak evidence. The children were mostly White, mostly from well-educated families, and had a narrow range of socioeconomic status, so the results may not transfer to families with fewer resources. In the older group, children excluded because reading data were missing read on their own significantly less often than those included, which may have biased the results. The two tasks were not built for this question: the authors note that both tasks may activate the same frontal regions, which could hide a real relationship rather than prove there is none.

Funding came from the National Institutes of Health (grant R01DC013274) to James R. Booth. The article is published open access under a read and publish agreement between Vanderbilt University and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

Do not read the one strong result as evidence that reading to a child builds their language. It is a correlation in the older group only, the preregistered primary analysis found nothing, and the same children's scores on standardised vocabulary and phonological awareness tests were not significantly related to how much they were read to. The finding is a difference in brain response during a word task, not a change in a child's abilities.