Visualizing How We Read - Dana Foundation.
Neuroimaging is opening a window onto how we learn to read. Acquiring this complex, demanding skill, researchers find, is a richly orchestrated process that recruits and connects diverse brain regions.
Ultimately, they hope, what’s learned in the laboratory will guide more powerful teaching methods adapted to the quirks and variations of individual children’s brains.
Dyslexia has drawn the most attention. Earlier research identified defective phonological processing—a relative inability to break words into their component sounds—as the core problem, while other studies focused on visual areas that recognize the shapes of words (the left temporal-occipital cortex, or “visual word-form area”). Researchers are now looking more closely at how parts of the brain that process letters and language sounds work together.
"When looking at letters and words, skilled readers activate a specialized part of the visual system in a way that dyslexic readers typically don't. One thing that is driving this effect may be its coordination with the phonological system,” says Bruce McCandliss, chair of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. As the reader seeks phonological information from print, “it puts pressure on the visual system to reorganize and deliver that information in more and more effective ways.”
