My first book I ever read was Hop on Pop by Dr. Suess, but what was going on in my brain
when I was learning to read?
Hey guys.
Julia here for DNews
According to a study by the Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy
32 million American adults can’t read.
More than most developed nations, so what’s going on?
Is our education system failing us?
Or is it our language?
Here in the states most students begin to learn to read in kindergarten, learning the
alphabet, turning those letters into sounds and then working their way up to whole words.
But learning to read is a very long complicated processes.
One of the keys to being able to read is Automatic word processing.
It’s basically how the brain decides a group of symbols is actually a word within milliseconds.
One study published in the journal Developmental Science found that this process happens around
fourth and fifth grade.
But for some the process is much longer.
Researchers had participants look at a list of words, fake words that looked like real
words, and strings of random symbols.
They found that for most people, no matter their age knew the difference between real
words and not.
But after placing an electrode cap on participants heads, the researchers learned how people
subconsciously react to words and symbols.
They found that college kids could instantly tell the difference but surprisingly elementary
school students still respond to random symbols as words even as late as 5th grade.
So this experiment was designed to test Automatic word processing.
So your brain reads these symbols as words, which it reads not based on its individual
parts or letters, but based on how it looks as a whole.
You’ve seen that meme going around, that if letters are mixed up in a word you can
still read it.
While most of that post is just internet baloney, it does have some truth to it.
Your brain can read words as a single object rather than a string of letters put together.
A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that there’s a small area of the brain,
on the left side of the visual cortex, that can “read” words.
Basically this part of the brain sits right next to the part that recognizes faces.
So one area of the visual cortex can quickly identify a face, another can quickly read
a word.
But when is the best time to learn to read?
Well there’s a crucial window between kindergarten and third grade.
Research published in the journal Psychological Science found that the amount of white matter
growth in the temporoparietal region during that window strongly predicted how well that
kid would learn to read.
It didn’t matter so much as to what their home life was like or their genetic predisposition.
This area of the brain is super important for things like phonological processing, speech,
and reading.
One of the lead researchers, Fumiko Hoeft, thinks that if the growth in this part of
the brain doesn’t happen at the right time, the kid could have problems with reading.
But the problem with our literacy rate might have more to do with our language than with
our educational system or our brains.
English is one of the most irregular languages.
Words more often break rules than conform.
So learning to read and write becomes a matter of memorizing words which can take years and
years.
Other languages it can only take a year, because they have a written language that follows
rules.
So if a person comes across a new word they haven’t heard before, they can pretty much
figure out how to spell it.
In English read and read mean two different things but are spelled the exact same way.
WHY.
COME ON ENGLISH WHY.
Apparently I am not the only one who questions this, from Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic
alphabet to an entirely new system called Unspell which looks like squiggly lines, there’s
been plenty of attempts to reform the written language over the years.
Will it happen anytime soon?
Probably not.
Speaking of reading, while it may be one of the best pastimes around, it’s sometimes
considered one of the most dangerous.
In Nazi Germany thousands of books were burned in an attempt to control the minds of their
people.
To find out about a touching memorial to all the lost books, check out this great episode
from our seeker show Seeker.
So what do you think?
Is English due for an overhaul?
What was it like for you when you first learned to read?
Tell us about it down below.