Reading and writing is something most of us take for granted. Grabbing a pen to jot something down or using our smartphone to read or answer a text message or email is something to which we don’t give even a moment’s thought. Reading and writing, however, are amazingly complex skills – as Falk Huettig from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and his colleagues Régine Kolinsky and Thomas Lachmann outline in the foreword to “The effects of literacy on cognition and brain functioning”, a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. To read and write, the brain must coordinate numerous perceptual and cognitive functions. These include, for example, basic visual skills, phonological perception, long-term memory and working memory. That’s why it takes years of practice for reading and writing to become so deeply engrained as to be effortless. Learning to read and write in turn modifies the structure and function of the brain.
Research in this area focuses on two fundamental questions. What conditions need to be in place for us to be able to learn to read and write? How does this complex skill affect our perception and cognition? In order to answer these questions, comparisons are particularly useful: for example, looking at the differences between good adult readers and adults who have never learnt to read; or the difference between children who learn to read easily and children who have more difficulty with this, or may have dyslexia.
In the case of dyslexia in particular, it is often hard to differentiate whether the associated deficits are causative or whether they occur because readers of comparable age have trained these cognitive skills through reading. Some years ago, José Morais from the University of Brussels determined that reading significantly improves phonological awareness (the ability to recognise specific sound structures of a language). People with dyslexia often find it difficult to distinguish these structures. John F. Stein from the University of Oxford argues that this is merely a side effect, rather than the cause, of reading difficulties.
More at the link. Here's the introduction to a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience:
Falk Huettig, Régine Kolinsky & Thomas Lachmann (2018) The culturally co-opted brain: how literacy affects the human mind, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33:3,275-277, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2018.1425803
"the ability to recognise specific sound structures of a language"
ReplyDeleteNon dyslexic people and they way they think. One of life's enduring mysteries.