Abstract
Learning to read profoundly changes a child's brain. Understanding the neural mechanisms by which we learn to read can help us to better teach reading and understand its difficulties.
In my talk, I will show recent brain imaging data that indicate how the acquisition of reading recycles several pre-existing visual and auditory areas of the brain in order to redirect them towards the processing of letters and phonemes. Comparison of the brains of literate and illiterate people revealed three major sites of improvement due to schooling : early visual areas, the visual word form area of the cortex (also known as the " brain mailbox ", a region specialized in the visual recognition of letter strings) and the planum temporale (a region involved in phonological processing). New brain imaging and modeling studies provide a detailed picture of how the ventral visual cortex and associated language areas adapt to reading. I'll conclude by discussing some implications of these findings : (1) why do students make particular errors, especially of mirror-letter confusion ? (2) what are the best strategies for teaching reading, focusing on letters, their order and their correspondences with phonemes ? And (3) how can we diagnose the various forms of dyslexia, some of which originate solely at the visual level ?
