Children and Adults Reading Fairy Tales fMRI

This Science Data Bank record holds functional MRI from a study at Capital Normal University on how the brain processes naturalistic text in children and adults. Participants read Chinese passages taken from four fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Each story was shown as one block of ten sentence trials. The record was deposited by Wei Zhou, funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 31500886), and published on 30 April 2026. It is listed as supporting a manuscript under review on the hierarchical alignment between brain activity and language models during story reading in children and adults.

Composition

The record description reports 86 participants, children and adults together. How many are children, their ages, sex and reading ability are not given. The deposit consists of five files totalling about 3.5 GB. The files are not listed publicly, so their exact contents and format are unknown.

Acquisition

Scans were acquired on a Siemens Prisma 3 T scanner at the Imaging Center for Brain Research, Peking University, while participants read the stories. The data were preprocessed in SPM12 with slice timing correction, motion correction, coregistration of structural and functional images, segmentation and spatial normalization. The coregistration step implies that structural images were collected, but the record does not say whether they are part of the deposit. Sequence parameters are not stated.

Known limitations

Access is restricted: applicants state their name, institution and purpose, and the depositor decides alone whether to share. No license or terms of use are published. The associated paper had not been published when the record was checked, so the cohort is documented only by the short record description. Demographics, the child and adult split, and whether raw or only preprocessed images are shared are not documented.