The project aims to evaluate the diagnostic validity in early primary school years of a computer-based, Reading-Free Screening Tool (RFST) for Developmental Dyslexia (DD) and other reading difficulties, which we have recently developed. The project is conceived as a longitudinal… Read more study covering a range of behavioural, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging indices, to identify neurocognitive markers capable of detecting risks and signs of DD and other reading difficulties before they become clinically manifest, thus permitting more timely interventions in the early phases of the learning process. The focus on a reading-free assessment of the neurocognitive prerequisites of literacy is motivated by the necessity to have a screening tool that can be equally applied in young monolingual children and in minority language children (MLC) with diverse language origins. This is of fundamental importance, since DD may be initially confused with subtler reading difficulties that can generally resolve if promptly treated, as may be the case with MLC. We therefore need new screening tools that can effectively distinguish neurodevelopmental reading deficits, as in DD, from reading difficulties due to environmental and linguistic factors. These objectives will be achieved by the collaboration of three units. We will collect multiple cohorts of primary school children who will be longitudinally assessed by means of the RFST in grades 2 and 3, and will also undergo a standardised clinical evaluation of reading skills in grade 3 to discriminate typical from atypical readers. Unit 1 will sample 30 children with familial risk for DD, and collect additional behavioural and neuroimaging measures; Unit 2 will sample 100 children, either monolingual or MLC, and validate additional reading-free tasks; Unit 3 will sample 30 prematurely born children, collecting neuroimaging measures. Units 1 and 3 will also jointly collect 30 control children born at term and without familial risk for DD. These diverse populations cover a broad range of risks for reading difficulties, and reflect the added value of the project, aiming to elucidate the multifactorial nature of reading deficits along a neurodevelopmental continuum. Cohort-specific and pooled analyses of the multivariate longitudinal data will leverage semi-automatic methods able to classify typical versus atypical readers at grade 3, based on RFST indices and other neurobehavioural and neuroimaging measures at grade 2. We thus aim to identify a set of discriminant neurocognitive markers of DD and other reading disorders, hence providing evidence-based grounding for the predictive power of our RFST. Discriminant RFST tasks will be implemented in a web-app (based on preliminary work by Units 1 and 3), which will be released and tested during the project, aiming for a freely available tool that can support primary school teachers and clinicians in the early recognition of children at risk of developing reading difficulties.