Even for Late Learners, Starting to Read Changes the Brain Fast

Submitted by Judy Hanning on Tue, 2017-07-11 18:00
According to a study in the journal “Science Advances”, learning to read (even at a delayed rate) makes large changes in the brain in the brain quickly. Falk Huettig and his team of researchers at Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics tracked changes and brain activity in illiterate Indian adults learning to read for 6 months.

“As an individual learns to read, certain parts of the brain become more developed, including the occipital lobe as well as deep parts of the brain stem and thalamus.”

The participants in this study were learning the language of Indians and Nepal’s called Devanagari. This language is much more complex then the English language. The team of researchers found as the subjects learned to read they developed better connections between the occipital lobe, parts of the brain stem, and the thalamus. Even though this study was conducted on adults it suggests that the changes in children’s brain could be substantially more.
Learning to read makes deep changes in the brain quickly, even for those who come to reading late, according to a new study in the journal Science Advances.
~ Education Week

Key Takeaways:

1
Learning to read changes the brain, which happens even for those who learn to read late.
2
A study found that as adults became literate, they developed strong connections between the occipital lobe and parts of the thalamus, areas associated with decoding complex vision.
3
The stronger these connections, the faster the adults were able to decode strings of letters.
Read the full article here:
http://www.readingrockets.org/news/even-late-learners-starting-read-changes-brain-fast