Cognitive foundations of reading

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The last two lectures were devoted to applying these general principles to two specific areas of primary education : learning to read and to do arithmetic. In both these areas, a great deal of research supports the hypothesis of neural recycling (the importance of constraints imposed by pre-existing neural circuits), the importance of brain plasticity, and the role of automation.

In the case of reading, it is a circuit involving the visual cortex of the left hemisphere, within the lateral occipitotemporal sulcus, that is modified during learning. It develops a representation of letters and their sequence to form written words. This visual region plays a pivotal role : its projections to different sectors of the temporal lobe are modified to represent, on the one hand, correspondences between graphemes and phonemes (deciphering or phonological reading pathway) and, on the other, the direct passage from the chain of letters to the meaning of words (lexical-semantic pathway). A comparison of literate and non-literate individuals shows that occipito-temporal circuits in the left hemisphere are profoundly altered by learning to read: visual cortex is modified, including in its earliest stages; face representation is displaced ; mirror invariance is slightly reduced ; and auditory areas in the planum temporale also see their activity increase. Moreover, during the early stages of learning, attentional networks in the parietal and frontal lobes are strongly activated, but this contribution diminishes as reading becomes more automatic, while temporal activation increases.

These experimental results, coupled with converging research in educational psychology, lead us to outline some pedagogical recommendations, which my colleagues and I have summarized in the book Learning to Read: From Cognitive Science to the Classroom (2011). All research points to the importance of explicit learning of the alphabetic code. Grapheme correspondences - phoneme must be introduced as part of a rational progression. Remember that the very existence of phonemes is not self-evident to the non-literate child or adult. Combinatorics and left-right reading must be explicitly taught. Learning to read benefits from being accompanied by exercises in writing or tracing letters : by adding a motor code to the mental lexicon of letters, these activities are likely to facilitate memory of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and they also reduce mirror confusions, for example between b and d.

Finally, while many studies show that teaching the grapho-phonological code is the best strategy for rapidly achieving a good understanding of words, sentences and texts, there is no doubt that this strategy is not enough: knowledge of word and sentence structure is a vast area of competence, essential to adult reading, and one that benefits from being explicitly taught to children. Many French spelling difficulties can be explained by morphology (word roots, prefixes, suffixes, grammatical endings, etc.), which is itself partly deduced from the etymology and history of our language. Maryse Bianco's work shows that specific training in text comprehension, drawing attention to the semantic clues conveyed by anaphora, verb tense, negation, etc., is beneficial for primary school children.