An early detection framework for young Chinese learners at risk of reading difficulty using fNIRS and deep learning

Reading difficulty (RD), a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting language acquisition in children, necessitates early screening for effective educational interventions. This study proposes the RD-risk Classifier (RDr-C), a novel framework integrating functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) with deep learning, specifically combining a dual-layer graph convolutional network (GCN), a bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM), and multi-head self-attention mechanisms (MSA) for 7-8-year-old children’s literacy assessment. The model was validated using fNIRS signals from 30 participants (16 experimental group, 14 control group) during the visual sign recognition test and phonetic discrimination test, with performance evaluated through 5 runs 5-fold cross-validation experiments. Results show that RDr-C achieved a mean classification accuracy of 99.60% and 99.66% in visual and auditory tests, respectively, significantly outperforming traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and existing fNIRS classification models (e.g., fNIRS-T, fNIRSNet). Furthermore, leave-one-subject-out cross-validation demonstrates that RDr-C achieves global accuracies of 89.33% and 87.93% on visual and auditory tasks, respectively, with corresponding Kappa coefficients of 0.78 and 0.76, confirming its robustness across individuals. Feature shuffling and wavelet transformation visualizations further confirm robust feature separation, highlighting the model’s ability to capture distinct hemodynamic patterns associated with RD. By integrating the spatial feature extraction of GCN, the temporal modeling of BiLSTM, and the global dependency capture of MSA, this work establishes a non-invasive neuroimaging paradigm for educational neuroscience. The high-precision classification lays a technical foundation for early screening tools, with future applications extending to multimodal brain-computer interfaces and longitudinal intervention monitoring.