# The neurodevelopmental trajectory of reading: a publicly available multimodal neuroimaging database

> **NIH NIH R03** · HASKINS LABORATORIES, INC. · 2021 · $79,900

## Abstract

Project Summary (30 lines of text)
Reading disability (RD) is the most common neurodevelopmental disorder of childhood, estimated to affect 10-
15% of children of otherwise typically developing children. RD is a life-long disorder with significant difficulties
persisting into adolescence and adulthood in several domains. Understanding the key environmental, cognitive
and neurobiological bases of reading and disorders is fundamental to improve diagnostics and treatment of
reading disabilities. Although much progress has been made on how the neural circuitry for reading depends on
reading ability, quantitative analyses of how the brain structure and function underlies reading as a function of
age and ability, and their interaction, are still lacking. A number of relevant findings originated from our lab and
were supported by a series of NICHD grants. Although we have made significant progress on each of these
grants in isolation, we strongly believe that making these datasets available to the scientific community allows
for addressing questions that so far remained unanswered and this constitutes the key significance of this
proposal. Across studies we used comparable measures at the level of brain and behavior, and given the rich
range on age, ability and comorbidity status and the comparability of measures the potential scientific yield from
combining these data sets into a unified database is strong. Important neurodevelopmental questions about how
component processing in reading changes with experience and their associated brain pathways and how this
differs in good and poor readers will be addressable. Moreover, an important longer-term strategic plan for which
this project would be a foundation is to involve our collaborators from the U.S and other countries in building
upon and extending this database to address reading development across orthographies.
The proposed database contains environmental and background data, structural and functional (print/speech
localizer tasks) brain measures across age and sensitive cognitive measures of code utilization in word reading,
and many other language related measures, that will allow the user to chart key brain/behavior relations. We
have collected over 1000 neuroimaging scans from 700 individuals across the age range from 5-30 years old,
from preliterate to highly proficient readers. All data will be fully anonymized, stored in the industry standard
Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) and uploaded, ultimately within a year after the grant's completion, on
OpenNEURO. OpenNEURO is a free and open platform, approved by the NIH brain initiative
(https://braininitiative.nih.gov/), for sharing in-vivo neuroimaging data. To increase awareness of the existence
of this database, a white paper describing the richness and power of the data will be submitted after all data is
uploaded. Additionally, we will inform other reading researcher using existing social media channels (e.g.
Haskins twitter feed) and mail...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10110648
- **Project number:** 1R03HD103862-01
- **Recipient organization:** HASKINS LABORATORIES, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Vincent L. Gracco
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $79,900
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-03-05 → 2023-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10110648

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10110648, The neurodevelopmental trajectory of reading: a publicly available multimodal neuroimaging database (1R03HD103862-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10110648. Licensed CC0.

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