Ken Pugh has been doing some of that research at Haskins for more than twenty years and is the current president of the laboratories. Amiable and clean-cut, he has the look of a softhearted New York City beat cop from an earlier era. Nice as he is, he has no patience for those who have yet to get the message. “It still continues to be the case that many people teach reading in a non-evidence-based way,” he says. “The work here on phonological awareness, that’s the evidence.” He is not the only one who thinks so. In 2000, a National Reading Panel funded primarily by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development summarized fifty years of accumulated evidence to arrive at five principles for teaching reading. The first is that phonologic awareness is a precursor. The second is the alphabetic principle, or phonics, “the idea that those units can be represented systematically by squiggles,” says Pugh. “You can’t build a building without a basement; phonics is the basement.” Third is building vocabulary, because you also can’t have a good reading system without a good vocabulary. Fourth is strategies for comprehension that kick in as kids go beyond decoding and gain fluency. The fifth and final principle, “under-appreciated but important,” says Pugh, is motivation, which encompasses cognitive skills like attention—Helen Neville’s “force multiplier”—and working memory and planning, all of which contribute to reading outcomes. This last also takes into account the plain old desire to read, a powerful aid in the process since the relationship between reading and all of these elements is reciprocal: Reading both requires and builds phonological awareness, vocabulary, and background knowledge in ways that mean, as one expert wrote, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
It took the National Reading Panel report to put an end to an unfortunate era known as the reading wars, a decade or two in which supporters of phonics did battle with those who believed in a “whole language” approach. “The idea [behind whole language] is that reading is as natural as anything else and you’ll pick up what you need, so don’t kill and drill on phonics—let’s tell kids to use text to guess what’s coming next,” says Pugh. “This is fundamentally inconsistent with the data. If kids are typically developing and you put them in whole-language approaches, they’re not going to do as well, but they may just squeak by because they’ll pick up on it on their own. But if kids are at risk for reading problems and if phonological awareness and that kind of thing doesn’t come free, you are essentially creating what [we] call curriculum casualties. It’s criminal.” The state of California is a case in point. In 1987, it adopted a curriculum that favored whole language over basic decoding skills. By 1993 and 1994, three out of four children in the state were reading below grade-level averages. Soon most schools had switched back to emphasizing letter-sound correspondence, exactly as later recommended by the National Reading Panel. Today, although a few proponents of whole language persist in their cause in the United States (with many more in other countries), the current reading debate centers on how best to teach the principles in the national report and help children master what reading expert Maryanne Wolf calls the three code-cracking capacities: phonological, orthographic, and semantic.
The goal is fluency, an ability to read quickly and understand, and to fall back on decoding only for difficult, unfamiliar words like “pericardium” or “obliterative.” Fluency affords an opportunity to go beyond the text, and the luxury of time to think. All of which you need, as Wolf points out, to appreciate when you read Charlotte’s Web not only what might have happened to Wilbur had Charlotte not intervened but also how sophisticated the spider’s reasoning really was.
How best to achieve fluency using the five principles is a discussion that is increasingly informed by neuroscience. Over the past fifteen years, Pugh and others have used the full complement of imaging techniques to better understand how reading circuits are built in the brain, what happens when they go awry, and how intervention and learning can help. “A skilled adult reader can decode words, pull them off the page, in what we estimate to be about 250 milliseconds. That ain’t a lot of time,” says Pugh. “If you can do that effortlessly and automatically, then you can read sentences and put your energy and your thought into the syntax and the pragmatics and understand the story. But if pulling each word off the page takes your whole soul and a lot of time—this is what happens in dyslexia—then by the time you get to the end of the sentence, you tend to forget the beginning and you end up with what appears to be problems of comprehension… . If you can’t read the words fast enough, it’s hard to have everything in short-term memory so that you can operate on what the story is about.”
The gold standard for diagnosing reading problems is nonsense—literally. The same skilled reader who took 250 milliseconds to process a word will take another 250 milliseconds to say it out loud. A non-word like “clart” or “tove,” which by definition the reader won’t have seen before, will take only an additional fifty milliseconds. “Why does that matter?” asks Pugh. “Because being a skilled reader means that you’ve developed these mappings between letters and sounds so well that you can essentially decode anything like a machine. And you can decode things you’ve never seen almost as fast as things you’ve seen a zillion times.” If children are struggling, whether they hear or don’t hear, they are slow, labored, and error-prone on real words and are “just horribly challenged by nonsense words,” says Pugh.
All of this is visible in the brain. Neural activity shifts and concentrates as children learn. The beginning reader looking at a word will use more of the brain in both hemispheres and from front to back—the occipital lobes that control vision, the temporal and parietal lobes that are essential for language, and the frontal lobe that controls executive processes. Over time, the activity coalesces primarily in the left hemisphere, using less of the frontal lobe (anything automatic requires less thinking) and less of the right hemisphere (because language networks have become more fully engaged). Fluency has a signature as clear as John Hancock’s—a concentrated response in the perisylvian cortex, which runs along the temporal, parietal, and frontal axis, home to language processing areas.
One of several recent studies that captured this process of change was done at the University of Oregon and involved eighteen kindergartners in an fMRI scanner. The children watched a series of images flash for less than two seconds at a time. Some were lowercase letters such as “k” or “c.” Some were false fonts that looked like a letter but weren’t (for example, a “c” flipped to open to the left and squared off just a touch). If the same letter or false font flashed twice in a row, the child had to press a button. Those who were considered at-risk for reading showed no difference in response to letters or false fonts. But those who appeared to be on track showed slightly more brain activity in left-hemisphere areas when looking at letters. The false fonts activated more of the visual system that corresponds with object recognition and fewer language areas. After eight weeks of school and an additional thirty-minute reading intervention daily for the at-risk group, the brains of both sets of children had changed. The response in those who began on track had matured to look more like adult readers. Those who had been at-risk looked more like their peers who’d begun ahead of them.
“Reading is an exercise in plasticity,” says Pugh. “It’s taking lots of systems in the brain that do different jobs with language, memory, attention, vision, and associative learning and turning them into these really efficient circuits that allow you to get from eye to meaning in a couple of hundred milliseconds.” Success, then, depends on the brain’s ability to connect and integrate these various areas, each of which matures on its own timetable. That’s one reason why children the world over usually begin to learn to read at five or older—until that point, they are not biologically ready. One necessary change is that areas that have been wired for speech adapt to also receive visual information in the form of letters. “What reading demands in hearing children is to get away from vision and into language as quickly as possible, because ultimatel
y you want to use the biologically specialized systems for phonology, syntax, and comprehension,” explains Pugh. “At some level your grandmother could predict that, but at another level it’s profound.”
This does not diminish the importance of vision. We need vision to read print. (In blind readers of braille, similar brain processes are at work from the point at which the information—received by touch—reaches the language areas at about two hundred milliseconds.) Important work by French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and cognitive psychologist Bruce McCandliss of Vanderbilt University suggests the existence of a visual word form area—a spot toward the back of the brain in the left occipitotemporal lobe that seems to specialize in recognizing text. Dehaene calls it “the brain’s letter box.” The eyes impose constraints on reading, he points out in his book Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, because they can take in only a little bit of information at a time, usually up to twelve letters. Good readers, though, manage to read four hundred to five hundred words per minute. So from the first step of visual analysis, those readers are rapidly transmitting the incoming visual information to other brain areas. Each system in the brain plays a role and, in working with its neighbors, is changed by the experience. “The brain becomes multimodal and that changes everything,” says Pugh. “It’s no longer auditory speech or visual. It’s relational. It’s combinatorial.”
Sound and vision together help determine the continuum of difficulty for learning to read in different languages. A transparent language like Italian, the easiest to learn, looks as it sounds. “Every letter maps onto a single phoneme, with virtually no exceptions,” notes Dehaene. Mandarin Chinese, the most difficult language, does not. Its thousands of characters usually transcribe whole words and must generally be memorized. Italian children can learn to read in a few months; Chinese children are still working on it well into middle school. English and French children are in the middle. They may not have to master Mandarin, but Dehaene, who argues for transparent spelling, notes that “an immense gap between the way we write and the way we speak [in English] causes years of unnecessary suffering for our children.” If you don’t believe him, consider “bow” and “bough” and “tow” and “tough.”
In any language, a brain that can read is forever altered. Proof of that came from studies of women raised in small Portuguese villages. It was the tradition in those villages that one daughter in a family would be educated and the others would be married off without much schooling. As a result, researchers were presented with a ready-made population in which women of otherwise similar intelligence and background differed only in that one knew how to read and the other did not. In another nonsense-word study, the women listened to progressively harder nonsense words and were asked to say back what they’d just heard. “It’s called auditory shadowing,” explains Pugh. “You hear, you say. No reading. Women who were literate were better at hearing those sounds and getting them out of their mouths in the right way.” He pauses for emphasis. “Think just for a second. Literacy, which has changed the brain, actually has a benefit on speech perception.” When the researchers looked at activity in the brains of the women, they found that the literate women were using the reading circuits they had developed in order to do the task.
A second study showing something similar was done by researchers Mark Seidenberg and Michael Tanenhaus back in 1979. In a study of hearing literate adults, they played two words. The subjects had to decide if the words rhymed. If they heard a pair of words like “pie”/“tie,” they would be faster to say they rhymed than a pair like “rye”/“tie.” Why? Because “pie” and “tie” are spelled the same and “rye” and “tie” are not. Only a reader knows that.
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The promise of the new understanding of how reading works in the brain is that it might allow educators to catch problems earlier. As it is, children are often well into elementary school before they’re identified as needing help. Dennis and Victoria Molfese are hoping to change that. Both psychologists at the University of Nebraska, they have been working for years on identifying patterns in very young children’s brains that predict reading problems later. As early as the 1980s, the Molfeses used EEG to measure infants’ brain waves and found that a slower response to acoustic stimuli such as “ba” and “ga” correlated with stronger or weaker language skills and vocabulary size as the children got older. In 2000, Dennis Molfese published a study showing that he could use brain responses to sound in newborns to predict with 80 percent accuracy which children would struggle with reading at age eight. By the year 2011, Molfese said his predictions were up to “about ninety-nine percent” correct.
If this is true, what can we do to change the outcome? That would be easier to answer if we knew exactly what it is that’s going wrong in the processing for dyslexic readers. This is the focus of Usha Goswami at Cambridge University. “It may be that we need to think more about the kind of acoustic cues in the signal that give you information about where syllables begin and which syllables rhyme with each other,” she says. Her theory about what might be occurring is grounded in work by David Poeppel.
About ten years ago, Poeppel was wrestling with the question of exactly how we chop up what we hear in order to process it efficiently. Trying to reconcile the need to sample the world in phoneme-size chunks—the standard thinking—but also seemingly in slightly longer, syllable-size chunks, Poeppel thought perhaps it was possible to have it both ways. What if, he wondered, the mind listens to the world through two separate time windows, a fast one for phonemes of twenty to fifty milliseconds and a slower one for syllables, more on the order of one hundred fifty to three hundred milliseconds? “One way the brain proceeds is to break complicated scientific problems into many problems,” he says. He imagined essentially that as you hear the world—music or speech—your brain records two CDs, one for the left hemisphere and one for the right. But when your brain samples them, a certain asymmetry sets in: For the CD on the left, you look at more of the fast-rate information and less of the slow-rate and vice versa for the CD on the right. Then you combine the two for the fullest possible picture.
Goswami’s theory is that dyslexic readers struggle in the slower time window. In particular, they have trouble discerning the sharp increase in signal intensity, the “rise time,” that accompanies the start of a new syllable. Another prominent researcher, Anne-Lise Giraud, argues the opposite, that it may be that dyslexic readers struggle with the faster time window that governs phonemes. But either way, the general idea supports Goswami’s remedies, which include nursery rhymes, poetry, and music.
All of those suggestions are echoed by other researchers who’ve looked at interventions that build phonological awareness. Poetry sharpens the developing ability to hear the smallest sounds of language, argues Maryanne Wolf. Old-fashioned children’s rhymes such as Mother Goose include alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition, she notes, all of which help the cause. Wolf’s group recently published a study showing that kindergartners who got more musical training demonstrated greater phonological awareness than those who got less. In addition, an early, well-known experiment in the United Kingdom demonstrated the power of rhyme to facilitate reading. Lynette Bradley and Peter Bryant worked with four groups of four-year-old children. Two of the groups got special training on words that either started with the same sound (alliteration) or rhymed, and were asked to put together those that shared sounds. One of those groups was also shown a letter that matched the shared sound. When tested several years later, those who had received the rhyme training were much better at phonological awareness and learned to read more easily. If they had also seen the matching letter during training, they did best of all.
There’s at least one other striking correlation between early experience and later reading success. “Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story,” wrote Wolf. “How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be
one of the best predictors of later reading… . As they listen to stories of Babar, Toad, and Curious George and say ‘goodnight moon’ every evening, children gradually learn that the mysterious notations on the page make words, words make stories, stories teach us all manner of things that make up the known universe.”
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What if the child can’t hear Goodnight Moon? What if, as for Alex, bedtime stories are falling on deaf ears? Given all that I had learned, it was no longer surprising that deaf and hard-of-hearing children struggled so much with reading, yet all the more worrisome when Alex’s hearing got worse just as he was beginning to learn to tackle books. In addition to the inherent difficulty of acquiring phonologic awareness when you can’t hear spoken language, there is the stark fact that for many decades, even centuries, deaf children did not learn any language until they entered school. Even today, there are a few children in this situation. I have met some.
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