Silvia Brem’s research group from the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital of Psychiatry and the University of Zurich has shown how the organization of certain brain structures appears to be a meaningful marker of reading development.
Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the researchers in Silvia Brem’s team examined how the structure of brain regions involved in reading develop in relation to one another across the brain, and how these relationships differ depending on a person’s age and reading ability. This provided new insights into the brain’s structural organization and the joint development of regions within functional networks, such as the reading network.
The researchers compared how the structures of different reading-related brain regions are linked in children and adults with typical reading abilities to identify age-related differences and common patterns. They also compared typically reading children with children who have reading difficulties. This analysis of how brain regions develop in relation with each other is known as structural covariance.
Focusing on gray matter in areas important for reading, the researchers did not find major changes in the structural covariance of reading-related brain regions between typically reading children and adults. This suggests that the basic structure of the brain’s reading network forms early and remains relatively stable after the first years of schooling. However, children with reading difficulties showed different patterns of structural covariance than typically reading children of the same age. These results indicate that structural covariance between key language-related areas appears to be a meaningful marker of both typical and impaired reading development. They give insight into how differences in brain co-development may relate to reading challenges. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of examining brain organization at the network level, rather than focusing solely on isolated regions, when studying typical and impaired reading during development.
Reference: Amelie Haugg, Nada Frei, Christina Lutz, Sarah V. Di Pietro, Iliana I. Karipidis, Silvia Brem, The structural covariance of reading-related brain regions in adults and children with typical or poor reading skills, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 72, 2025, 101522, ISSN 1878-9293, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101522
Useful links:
- Silvia Brem’s website: https://www.kjpd.uzh.ch/de/transl-forschung/kog-neuro/team/leitung-kogn-neurow/brem.html
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