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Dyslexia is a neurobiological disorder impairing learning to read. Brain responses of infants at genetic risk for dyslexia are abnormal already at birth, and associations from infant speech perception to preschool cognitive skills and reading in early school years have been documented, but there are no studies showing predicting power until adolescence. Here we show that in at-risk infants, brain activation to pseudowords at left hemisphere predicts 44% of reading speed at 14 years, and even improves the prediction after taking into account neurocognitive preschool measures of letter naming, phonology, and verbal short-term memory. The association between infant brain responses and reading speed is mediated by preschool rapid automatized naming ability. Therefore, we suggest that rapid naming and reading speed could share a similar cognitive process of automatized access to lexicon via phonological representations, and brain activation to speech sounds in infancy probably acts as an index of deficient development of the same process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Associative learning has been identified as one of several non-linguistic processes involved in reading acquisition. However, it has not been established whether it is an independent process that contributes to reading performance on its own or whether it is a process that is embedded in other linguistic skills (e.g., phonological awareness or phonological memory) and, therefore, contributing to reading performance indirectly. Research has shown that performance on tasks assessing associative learning, e.g., paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks, is lower in children with specific reading difficulties compared to typical readers. We explored the differential associations of two distinct verbal–visual PAL tasks (the Bala Bbala Graphogame, BBG, and a Foreign Language Learning Task, FLLT) with reading skills (word reading and pseudo-word decoding), controlling for phonological awareness, rapid naming, and letter and digit span in children at risk for reading disabilities and their typically developing peers. Our study sample consisted of 110 children living in rural Zambia, ranging in age from 7 to 18 years old (48.1% female). Multivariate analyses of covariance were used to explore the group differences in reading performance. Repeated-measures ANCOVA was used to examine children's learning across the PAL tasks. The differential relationships between both PAL tasks and reading performance were explored via structural equation modeling. The main result was that the children at risk for reading difficulties had lower performance on both PAL tasks. The BBG was a significant predictor for both word reading and pseudo-word decoding, whereas the FLLT—only for word reading. Performance on the FLLT partially mediated the association between phonological awareness and word reading. These results illustrate the partial independence of associative learning from other reading-related skills; the specifics of this relationship vary based on the type of PAL task administered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]