Children with poor reading comprehension despite typical word reading skills were examined using neuropsychological, genetic, and neuroimaging data collected from the Genes, Reading and Dyslexia Study of 1432 Hispanic American and African American children. This unexpected poor comprehension was associated with profound deficits in vocabulary, when compared to children with comprehension skills consistent with their word reading. Those with specific comprehension difficulties were also more likely to have RU2Short alleles of READ1 regulatory variants of DCDC2, strongly associated with reading and language difficulties. Subjects with RU2Short alleles showed stronger resting state functional connectivity between the right insula/inferior frontal gyrus and the right supramarginal gyrus, even after controlling for potentially confounding variables including genetic ancestry and socioeconomic status. This multi-disciplinary approach advances the current understanding of specific reading comprehension difficulties, and suggests the need for interventions that are more appropriately tailored to the specific comprehension deficits of this group of children.

研究人员使用从 1432 名西班牙裔美国人和非裔美国儿童的基因、阅读和阅读障碍研究中收集的神经心理学、遗传和神经影像数据对尽管具有典型的文字阅读能力但阅读理解能力较差的儿童进行了检查。与理解能力与单词阅读一致的儿童相比，这种意想不到的理解能力差与词汇量的严重缺陷有关。那些有特定理解困难的人也更有可能拥有 DCDC2 READ1 调节变体的 RU2Short 等位基因，与阅读和语言困难密切相关。具有 RU2Short 等位基因的受试者在右侧岛叶/额下回和右侧边缘上回之间表现出更强的静息状态功能连接，即使在控制了包括遗传血统和社会经济地位在内的潜在混杂变量之后也是如此。这种多学科方法增进了目前对特定阅读理解困难的理解，并表明需要更适合该群体儿童的特定理解缺陷的干预措施。