Children with Poor Reading Skills at the Word Level Show Reduced Fractional Anisotropy in White Matter Tracts of Both Hemispheres.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies showed that microstructural alterations are correlated to reading skills. In this study, we aim to investigate white matter microstructure of a group of Portuguese speakers with poor reading level, using different parameters of DTI. To perform this analysis, we selected children ranging from 8 to 12 years of age, poor readers (n = 17) and good readers (n = 23), evaluated in the word-level ability based on a Latent Class Analysis (LCA) of Academic Performance Test (TDE).