Stability and Validity of Parent - Child Engagement in Infants and Toddlers at High Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder

Introduction: Successful language comprehension in elementary school is a key predictor of long-term educational outcomes, and requires adequate skill in both narrative and expository genres (e.g. stories versus science/history material). Historically, expository comprehension has received lower attention in the classroom, resulting in a performance gap between expository and narrative in grade school. In response, the Common Core State Standards of education now encourage earlier Introduction: to expository comprehension (5-7 years old). However, very little is known of the neural substrates of genre, or how/whether genre-specific brain networks are influenced by early exposure. Previous neuroimaging work in our own lab has found that appropriate expository comprehension requires recruitment of restricted comprehension regions within the default mode network (DMN), and this specialization is facilitated by goal-oriented areas in the frontoparietal control network (FPN). No studies to date have tracked the development of these systems, or how they are influenced by early classroom experiences. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify (1.) the neurodevelopmental trajectory of expository comprehension, and (2.) whether greater exposure to exposition in the first-grade classroom interacts with this neural trajectory.