Chinese Reading Disability Phonological Intervention

This record holds the data behind a longitudinal intervention study at the University of Hong Kong on how Chinese readers with reading disability respond to phonological training. Children and adults with reading disability were randomly assigned to a four-week online phonological program or to a waitlist, and age-matched typical readers served as a reference group. Brain activity during an auditory rhyming task was measured before and after the training period, alongside a battery of reading and language tests. The files are deposited on HKU DataHub but are under embargo; the depositor shares them with qualified researchers on request after approval by the principal investigator.

Composition

The study enrolled 84 participants with reading disability (46 adults, 38 children) from primary schools and colleges in Guangdong Province, China, plus 39 neurotypical controls (20 adults, 19 children). Reading disability meant scoring at least 1.5 SD below norms on at least one of three reading tasks, with nonverbal reasoning in the normal range. Behavioral testing took place before training, right after it and three months later; MRI was done only at the first two time points. One child and three adults with reading disability did not attend the second scan.

Acquisition

All scans were acquired on a single 3 T Siemens Prisma with a 20-channel head coil at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou. Each session included a T1-weighted MPRAGE (1 mm slices) and two runs of gradient-echo EPI (TR 2 s, 1.7 x 1.7 x 3 mm voxels) during an auditory rhyming judgment task with lexical, perceptual and baseline conditions.

Known limitations

The record does not list the files or say whether raw images, preprocessed images or only derived maps are included. Four participants were excluded from the published analyses for head motion. The repository states a CC BY-NC 4.0 license, but the files are not downloadable during the embargo, and no study paper had been published when this entry was written, so per-group scan counts and demographics beyond the group sizes are not given.