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The present study investigates whether grade 6 reading outcomes, reading fluency, and reading comprehension can be predicted by grade 3 reading fluency, familial risk of dyslexia (FR), and grade 3 reading related skills: rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological awareness (PA), and vocabulary. In a sample of 150 children, of whom 83 had a parent with dyslexia, correlation and regression analyses were performed. FR, measured on a continuous scale, was by itself related to all outcomes. However, FR did not explain any variance on top of grade 3 reading fluency. Grade 3 reading fluency strongly predicted grade 6 reading fluency and was also related to reading comprehension. RAN improved the prediction of grade 6 reading fluency, though the additional explained variance was small. Vocabulary and PA fully explained the variance that grade 3 reading fluency explained in grade 6 reading comprehension. Vocabulary explained a substantial amount of variance in grade 6 reading comprehension making it an interesting clinical target. As we used continuous measures of reading fluency and FR, our findings are not biased by distinct diagnostic criteria.

Background: A lack of consensus exists in linking demographic, behavioral, and cognitive characteristics to biological stages of dementia, defined by the ATN (amyloid, tau, neurodegeneration) classification incorporating amyloid, tau, and neuronal injury biomarkers. Methods: Using a random forest classifier we investigated whether 27 demographic, behavioral, and cognitive characteristics allowed distinction between ATN‐defined groups with the same cognitive profile. This was done separately for three cognitively unimpaired (CU) (112 A‐T‐N‐; 46 A+T+N+/−; 65 A‐T+/‐N+/−) and three mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (128 A‐T‐N‐; 223 A+T+N+/−; 94 A‐T+/‐N+/−) subgroups. Results: Classification‐balanced accuracy reached 39% for the CU and 52% for the MCI subgroups. Logical Delayed Recall (explaining 16% of the variance), followed by the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale 13 (14%) and Everyday Cognition Informant (10%), were the most relevant characteristics for classification of the MCI subgroups. Race and ethnicity, marital status, and Everyday Cognition Patient were not relevant (0%). Conclusions: The demographic, behavioral, and cognitive measures used in our model were not informative in differentiating ATN‐defined CU profiles. Measures of delayed memory, general cognition, and activities of daily living were the most informative in differentiating ATN‐defined MCI profiles; however, these measures alone were not sufficient to reach high classification performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dyslexia is heritable and associated with phonological processing deficits that can be reflected in the event-related potentials (ERPs). Here, we recorded ERPs from 2-month-old infants at risk of dyslexia and from a control group to investigate whether their auditory system processes /bAk/ and /dAk/ changes differently. The speech sounds were presented in an oddball paradigm. The children were followed longitudinally and performed a word reading fluency test in second grade. The infant ERPs were subsequently analyzed according to high or low reading fluency in order to find a neurophysiological precursor of poor reading fluency. The results show that the fluent reading children (from both the at-risk and the control group) processed the speech sound changes differentially in infancy as indicated by a mismatch response (MMR). In the control group the MMR was frontally positive and in the fluent at-risk group the MMR was parietally positive. The non-fluent at-risk group did not show an MMR. We conclude that at-risk children who became fluent readers were better at speech processing in infancy than those who became non-fluent readers. This indicates a very early speech processing deficit in the group of later non-fluent readers. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)