Unlocking Literacy: How the Brain Learns to Read

The ability to read is a cornerstone of education and a gateway to knowledge. Yet, unlike spoken language, reading isn't an innate skill. Our brains aren't pre-wired for translating letters into sounds; instead, they repurpose existing areas meant for other functions. This article explores the fascinating science behind how the brain learns to read, drawing upon research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and education.

Reading: A Relatively New Skill

It's important to remember that reading is a relatively new skill for humans. Language in a visual format started with the Ancient Egyptians - hieroglyphics. But the requirement to read only became a thing for the general population in the last 3-400 years. Reading is an example of a cognitive skill humans have developed that is ahead of our genetic evolution. So there is no reading region in our brains, as of yet. There is a strong cultural element as to what reading means to an individual.

The Science of Reading: A Multifaceted Approach

The "science of reading" encompasses over five decades of research across various disciplines, including education, linguistics, psychology, and neurology. This research provides a deeper understanding of the skills involved in learning to read and how different brain regions collaborate to process written language. This understanding allows educators to develop best practices for teaching these skills, enabling more students to read proficiently.

The Simple View of Reading

One of the foundational concepts in the science of reading is the "Simple View of Reading," proposed by Gough and Tunmer in 1986 and expanded upon by Hoover and Gough in 1990. This theory posits that reading comprehension depends on two crucial abilities: decoding and language comprehension.

This relationship is expressed as an equation: decoding x language comprehension = reading comprehension. The multiplication sign highlights that weakness in either decoding or language comprehension can lead to overall reading difficulties. Decoding involves skills like word recognition, automaticity, and fluency, while language comprehension encompasses understanding language and sentence structure.

Scarborough’s Reading Rope

Another key element is Scarborough's Reading Rope (2001), which illustrates how different reading skills intertwine to create fluency. The rope consists of two main strands: word recognition and language comprehension.

The word recognition strands include:

Phonological awareness: The ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in spoken words.
Decoding: The ability to sound out words by matching letters to their corresponding sounds.
Sight recognition: The ability to recognize familiar words automatically.

The language comprehension strands include:

Vocabulary: Knowledge of word meanings.
Background knowledge: Understanding of the world and different concepts.
Language structures: Knowledge of grammar and sentence structure.
Verbal reasoning: The ability to make inferences and draw conclusions.
Literacy knowledge: Understanding of different types of texts and genres.

Throughout time, the word recognition strands and the language comprehension strands weave themselves together and reinforce one another, allowing the reader to become fluent.

Brain Regions Involved in Reading

Neuroscience research has identified several brain regions that play crucial roles in the reading process:

Read also: Engaging All Brain Parts

The left hemisphere: The part of the brain traditionally associated with language, particularly in written form.
Inferior frontal gyrus (IFG): Is responsible for speech sound awareness. Broca’s Area is also located here.
Parietal and temporal lobes: Comprise the receptive language center, which aids in language comprehension. Wernicke’s Area is also located here. The brain analyzes and connects words to their corresponding sound symbols in this area.
Occipital and temporal lobes: Located in the lower back part of the brain. Initially, when we’re born, this part of the brain is used to recognize faces and objects. This is what allows babies to recognize the faces of their parents. However, as we begin learning to read, this part of the brain adapts. It begins to recognize letters and patterns in readers. It becomes the brain’s orthographic processor for storing information about printed words: word spelling, pronunciation, and meaning.
Visual cortex: Helps us perceive letters and words.
Phonological cortex: Maps sounds to letters.
Semantic cortex: Stores word meanings.
Syntactic cortex: Helps us understand the rules and structure of sentences

These areas work together by forming efficient and fast neural pathways as we read.

The Reading Process: A Step-by-Step Transformation

When we read, our brains transform the shapes of letters and characters on a page into the sounds of spoken language. But how does the brain do this? That’s what cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene (Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read) is trying to find out. Dehaene, a professor at the Collège de France and a winner of the 2014 Brain Prize, studies how reading takes place in the brain and his research has revealed the brain networks involved.

Visual Input: The process begins with the visual system recognizing the letters on the page.
Letterbox Recognition: When emerging readers are learning to read, the brain sees a word and the “letterbox” begins to recognize that it’s a letter and what letter it is.
Phonological Decoding: Then, the sounds area goes to work to decode the sounds of the letter.
Connecting Sounds and Meaning: Repeated exposure to and practice sounding out words and spiraling the skills allows the brain to connect the “letterbox” to the “meaning area.”
Simultaneous Processing: When this happens, the brain processes the sound and meaning simultaneously.

The Importance of Explicit Instruction

While learning to speak is innate, reading requires explicit instruction. As infants, we first learned to process sounds, manipulate language sounds to make words, and then read single words to build our comprehension - including sight words - before we could read fluently, says Associate Professor Nadine Gaab of Harvard Medical School. “[The child] has to decode words, she has to have the vocabulary once she decodes the words, she has to know the meaning of the words, and she has to read fluently so that she can comprehend a whole paragraph,” she says. “These all have to come together for successful reading comprehension.” For this to happen, the various parts of the brain come into play.

The Five Pillars of Reading Instruction

In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified five essential components of reading instruction:

Phonemic awareness: Understanding the individual sounds (phonemes) that make up spoken words.
Phonics: Understanding the relationship between letters and sounds.
Fluency: Reading accurately and quickly.
Vocabulary: Knowing the meanings of words.
Comprehension: Understanding the meaning of written text.

Structured Literacy: An Evidence-Based Approach

In 2014, the International Dyslexia Association® proposed a new term: Structured Literacy. Structured Literacy is an umbrella term that encompasses the approaches that teach foundational reading skills through explicit instruction-in other words, that align with the science of reading.

Read also: Discover I-LABS's Research Areas

According to the IDA, Structured Literacy covers the evidence-based elements:

Phonology
Sound-symbol association
Syllables
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics

But more importantly, these elements are taught in an explicit, systematic, cumulative, diagnostic, and responsive way.

Reading and Dyslexia: Understanding the Brain's Differences

People with dyslexia have trouble with this. Certain reading instruction can lead to big changes, though. And technology allows us to see those changes.

Scientists learned that there are four brain regions that are related to reading: the visual cortex that helps us perceive letters and words the phonological cortex that maps the sounds to letters the semantic cortex that stores word meanings, and the syntactic cortex, that helps us understand the rules and structure of sentences

The parts of the brain involved in reading don’t function the same way in people with dyslexia as they do in others. Some areas are less active.

Brain Changes with Reading Intervention

What’s really exciting is that studies from neuroscience suggest that reading intervention may actually change the way struggling readers’ brains work (Barquero, Davis, & Cutting, 2014). Students who respond to word-focused interventions may be able to change how their brain functions to make their reading easier and more efficient. This is a promising area for research.

As reading skills improve with intensive instruction, brain activity increases in key areas in the left side of the brain.Intensive reading instruction also leads to changes in the right side of the brain. The changes in the right side of the brain may help make up for weaknesses on the left. We need more research to figure out if all of these changes, on the left and right sides of the brain, need to happen for reading skills to improve.

The good news for people with dyslexia is that their brains will “rewire” themselves if reading instruction is provided that explicitly teaches phonological awareness and decoding skills. The brain has plasticity through our lifetime which means our brains are able to change in order to learn new things. Brain imaging studies have shown that when dyslexics are taught to read (and given sufficient practice to become automatic with decoding), their brains create new circuits that connect the language processing parts of the brain with the visual processing part - the same as brains of non-dyslexics.

The Power of Brain Plasticity

Every child’s brain has to change the way it functions as the child learns to read. For most students, instruction and practice during the primary grades is sufficient to “train” the regions in the brain to learn to read.

The brain has plasticity through our lifetime which means our brains are able to change in order to learn new things. Brain imaging studies have shown that when dyslexics are taught to read (and given sufficient practice to become automatic with decoding), their brains create new circuits that connect the language processing parts of the brain with the visual processing part - the same as brains of non-dyslexics.

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