White matter properties associated with pre-reading skills in 6-year-old children born preterm and at term.

The sample was modest, with 36 children born preterm and 43 children born at term analysed. Not all recruited children were analysed: 18 of the preterm group and seven of the term group were excluded for MRI protocol, inability to scan, or motion. Children were assessed once at 6 years, so the study cannot show how these relationships change as reading develops. Reading scores were not used as main outcomes because 44% of children born preterm could not read more than one pseudo-word, which produced floor effects. The study is observational, so white matter measures cannot be said to cause language or phonological awareness differences. Preterm and term groups differed in SES, sex, and family history of reading delays, which may affect outcomes. Some preterm children had medical complications and abnormal early or age-6 MRI findings, although removing five with abnormal age-6 scans did not change the main regression results. The term group included data from 41 children previously reported by Travis et al., so the present analysis is not entirely independent of that prior report.

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Do not treat these tract measures as a clinical test or infer that preterm language scores are caused by white matter differences. The study measured children once at 6 years, had modest samples, and the right uncinate association was absent in preterm children.