Brain Research Helps Educators Better Understand Reading Difficulties

By Martha S. Burns, Ph. D.

Reading experts used to believe that dyslexia resulted from an individual’s problems in making the visual discriminations needed to recognize letters. But new studies using brain imaging technology are helping us understand the link between language and reading. Studies of areas of the brain used for reading have generally shown that the same areas involved in oral language usage and comprehension, are involved in reading.

Reading may be thought of as a translation of written symbols to the auditory ones. As far as the brain is concerned, reading is language.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz and her colleagues at Harvard University have been studying the brain and reading in a direct and detailed way by observing the brain in action during specific reading tasks. Using functional magnetic resonance imagery, they are able to view the areas of the brain that are more or less active during different reading activities.

For example, they have compared tasks that require relatively simple reading judgements such as, ‘do [bbBb] and [bbBb] match’, versus more complex judgements such as, ‘do [lete] and [jete] rhyme?’

Dr.Shaywitz and her colleagues have been specifically interested in how the activity of the brain of good readers compares with that of individuals who have dyslexia on the different tasks. They found, as have those who study damaged brains, that the areas of the brain involved in reading are those same language regions of the left hemisphere. However, they also found that the dyslexic readers showed the greatest differences, when compared to good readers, on the reading activities that involved sounding out the words (converting letters to speech sounds) rather than making visual matches.

The brain scans highlighted this difference. As the reading tasks required greater translation of letters to sounds, the dyslexic readers showed less activity than good readers in the posterior brain regions devoted to recognizing and interpreting speech sounds.

Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, has studied brain and language relationships in his patients who have suffered different types of brain damage. He has made tentative maps of the left hemisphere that illustrate how language is represented in the left hemisphere. In his maps, a large region of the central portion of the left hemisphere is devoted to representation of speech sounds (phonemes), the combination of those phonemes into meaningful units like word-endings and words (morphemes) and grammatical rules (syntax) for combining these words into meaningful sentences.

A larger area that surrounds this language core in the left hemisphere contains regions that allow us to translate our non-verbal concepts, ideas, and images into nouns and verbs.

Damasio has cited evidence that the ability to think of verbs involves structures in the frontal regions of the left hemisphere while nouns are more widely dispersed below and behind the central language core. Recent studies have shown that sophisticated users of sign-language employ roughly the same brain areas. In sign language, the equivalent of a morpheme is a visuo-motor sign.

In a new DVD produced by The University of Oregon Brain Development Lab (www.changingbrains.org), Dr. Helen Neville and her research associates have made new research on brain plasticity, reading and learning, accessible to parents and educators. In one segment, on reading, the authors describe the difference between brains of young children who are at risk for reading problems and children whose brains have developed adequate cognitive capacities to support reading. Using functional brain imaging, the researchers illustrate how effective reading intervention programs can strengthen brain regions that are essential for reading and create an efficient ‘reading brain’ even in children with developmental dyslexia.

One program that the Oregon researchers have incorporated in the studies is ‘Fast ForWord Language’.  In a research study published in the journal Brain Research in 2008, the Oregon researchers describe a neurophysiological study in which they showed that use of Fast ForWord Language enhanced attentional skills in both children with language problems and typically developing children.

In time, it may be possible to identify dyslexia definitively through neuroimaging technology. It is also conceivable that these technologies may be used to help educators devise programs that provide the greatest benefits to the brain language areas of students who are struggling with reading.

Dr Martha Burns will be a guest speaker at a key education conference series, ‘Building Brains for Learning: “It’s all in the Connections’ to be held in Sydney on March 8, Melbourne on March 10, and Auckland NZ on March 12. Dr Burns will address the implications of new neurological and literacy research and how both parents and educators can help children with learning difficulties achieve much better results. 

For further information on the seminars, please visit
www.fastforWORD.com.au/seminars2010