The document summarizes the neurological processes and developmental stages of reading. It discusses how visual patterns of letters are sent in parallel to areas of the brain involved in word meaning and articulation. It then outlines the typical developmental stages children progress through when learning to read, starting from recognizing letters and sounds (protoliteracy stage) to reading fluently by recognizing words as a whole (orthographic stage). It emphasizes that reading comprehension depends highly on a reader's prior knowledge of a topic.

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The Neuroscience of Reading
Sara Kazemi and Cristal Mejia-Arrechea
San Diego State University ● College of Education ● School of Teacher Education
The History of Written Systems A Neurological Model of Reading
Visual patterns of language recognized by the brain’s letterbox
are sent, in parallel, to various locations throughout the left
hemisphere of the brain (Figure 4). These areas include areas of
the temporal and frontal lobes that encode word meaning and
areas of the frontal lobe that deal with motor functions for
articulation such as Broca’s area.
While these areas are not solely used for reading, the
interconnection between these systems are crucial for people to
be able to read, to articulate what is read, and to comprehend
and encode the information being read.
Figure 4. A temporal series of EEG images reveals the neural pathways
that are activated during reading (Dahaene, 2009).
Developmental Stages of Reading
Protoliteracy Stage.
According to Barron (1992; in Reed, 2006), long before a child
begins to learn to read, she develops preliminary abilities. Two of
these abilities that serve as strong predictors of later reading
ability are the child’s phonological awareness (Figure 5) and
ability to recognize letters.
Logographic Stage.
Generally, at around age 5 or 6, children enter the logographic
stage of reading (Frith, 1985; in Reed, 2006). The visual systems
of the brain attempt to recognize words as if they were objects or
faces, paying attention to features such as shape, color, letter
orientation, and curvature (Dahaene, 2009).
At this stage, a child might recognize their own name or highly
relevant words such as a favorite food or drink.
Phonological Stage.
During the phonological stage, children are able to decode a
language’s graphemes into their corresponding phonemes. This
is an important stage as the child develops phonemic
awareness--that known letters can be rearranged to represent
new words. This discovery is not automatic and must be explicitly
taught (Morais, 1979; in Dahaene, 2009). At the phonological
stage, reading speed is strongly dependent on word length, as
the child deciphers the sound of a word one letter at a time.
Orthographic Stage.
As a developing reader reaches a higher level of reading
expertise, reading speed becomes less associated with the
length of the word and more highly associated with word
familiarity (Dahaene, 2009). Words that have been encountered
at a higher frequency take less time to decode and read than
words that are rarely or newly encountered. It is in this stage that
we can seemingly map words to meaning instantaneously. In
reality, the brain must perform a number of complex operations to
get from form to meaning, taking apart each string and
recomposing it into “a hierarchy of letters, bigrams, syllables, and
morphemes” (Dahaene, 2009).
Prior Knowledge and Reading Comprehension
References
Extant research maintains that the amount of prior knowledge of
a subject a learner has is strongly associated with how much new
information related to the subject she will retain. To illustrate this,
read the selection devised by Branson and Johnson (1973, p.
392; in Reed, 2006):
If the balloons popped, the sound wouldn’t be able to carry, since
everything would be too far away from the correct floor. A closed
window would also prevent the sound from carrying, since most
buildings tend to be well insulated. Since the whole operation
depends on a steady flow of electricity, a break in the middle of
the wire would also cause problems. Of course, the fellow could
shout, but the human voice is not loud enough to carry that far.
An additional problem is that a string could break on the
instrument. Then there could be no accompaniment to the
message. It is clear that the best situation would involve less
distance. Then there would be fewer potential problems. With
face to face contact, the least number of things could go wrong.
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read.
Penguin Group: New York, NY.
Gazzaniga, M.S., Ivry, R.B., and Mangun, G.R. (2014). Cognitive Neuroscience:
The Biology of the Mind. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY.
Nakanishi, A. (1990). The Writing Systems of the World. Tuttle Publishing:
Boston, MA.
Reed, S.K. (2006). Cognition: Theories and Applications. Wadsworth: Belmont,
CA.
Wolf, M., Vellutiino, F., and Gleason, J.B. (1997). "A Psycholinguistic Account of
Reading. In J. B. Gleason & N. B. Ratner (Eds.). Psycholinguistics.
Harcourt Brace College Publishers: Orlando, FL.
The ability to communicate linguistically is what makes us
uniquely human. Geschwind (1974; in Wolf, Vellutino, and
Gleason, 1997) argues that this unique human development led
to changes in our neuroanatomy. The structure and development
of written systems may reveal some things about our neurological
capabilities to process such systems.
The earliest known written system, developed around 3100 B.C.
by the Sumerians, were pictographs (Figure 1). Pictographs are
small pictures that directly represent a whole object or concept.
Figure 1. Sumerian pictographs (Sugi, 1968; in Nakanishi, 1990)
Figure 2. Japanese newspaper (Nakanishi, 1990).
Throughout the history of language, the development of new
writing systems has gradually become more abstract--from
representing whole objects, to representing individual syllables
or phonemes in a language. While more abstract, syllable- and
phoneme-based writing systems are generally more cognitively
efficient, particularly during the language acquisition stage,
since there are fewer symbols to encode into and retrieve from
memory (Wolf et al, 1997).
The Japanese language (Figure 2) uses two sets of syllabaries--
one for foreign words (Katakana) and another for Japanese
words. In addition to these syllabaries, Japanese has adopted
Chinese logographs--characters that represent entire words--
into a system known as Kanji. More recently, Japanese has
adopted the Roman alphabet (also known as the Latin alphabet)
for certain words--usually foreign abbreviations like “CD”--as
well.
The human brain has evolved several specialized areas that
allow us to perform the complex behavior of reading (Figure 3).
Although these systems are explained step-by-step, these
systems act in parallel.
When a person looks at words on a page or a billboard, that
visual sensory input is perceived through the eyes and sent to the
occipital lobe (shown in blue in Figure 3) and quickly recognized
as language by the ventral occipito-temporal region--an area of
the brain that joins the occipital (visual) and temporal
(comprehension) lobes. Dahaene (2009) refers to this area as
the brain’s “letterbox.”
Figure 3. A parallel neurological model of reading (Dahaene, 2009).
Figure 5. Aspects of phonological awareness include the ability to
segment words into individual syllables, onset and rime, and
phonemes.
Lift for context