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We investigated relations between cortical grey matter structure and individual differences in an array of literacy-related skills in a community-based sample of young adults. Whole-brain analysis revealed several structural correlates of skills related to establishing links between phonological and orthographic information. Decoding ability was positively correlated with grey matter volume (GMV) in left superior temporal sulcus, and grey matter thickness (GMT) in right superior temporal gyrus. Print exposure was negatively correlated with GMT in both left inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis) and the left fusiform gyrus (including the visual word form area). Both measures were also related to supramarginal gyrus (SMG), but with differential specificity: decoding was positively associated with GMV in left anterior SMG, and print exposure was negatively associated with GMT in left posterior SMG. These results refine previous functional and clinical findings by suggesting a novel role for left posterior SMG in the development of proficient reading.

Poster presented at the 31st annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Davis, CA, USA.

Host behavior and social factors have increasingly been implicated in structuring the composition of gut microbial communities. In social animals, distinct microbial communities characterize different social groups across a variety of taxa, although little longitudinal research has been conducted that demonstrates how this divergence occurs. Our study addresses this question by characterizing the gut microbial composition of an African Old World monkey, the black-and-white colobus (Colobus vellerosus), before and after a social group fission event. Gut microbial taxonomic composition of these monkeys was profiled using the V-4 hypervariable region of the bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA gene, and pairwise-relatedness values were calculated for all individuals using 17 short tandem repeat loci and partial pedigree information. The two social groups in this study were found to harbor distinct microbial signatures after the fission event from which they emerged, while these communities were not divergent in the same individuals before this event. Three genera were found to differ in abundance between the two new social groups: Parabacteroides, Coprococcus, and Porphyromonadaceae. Additionally, although this fission happened partially along lines of relatedness, relatedness did not structure the differences that we found. Taken together, this study suggests that distinct gut microbial profiles can emerge in social groups in