For years, a prevailing attitude has been that a child starts learning to read in pre-K or kindergarten, according to an article in The 74. A study by Nadine Gaab of the Harvard School of Education and her colleagues using MRI scans and an array of other assessments confirmed that the bases for reading skills begin to develop in a child’s brain by birth and continue building between infancy and preschool.
“We wanted to see how early the developmental trajectories of children who later develop good versus poor reading skills diverge, because that can give us a really important clue for when we should intervene, as well as what some of the risks and protective factors are,” Gaab says.
A key finding of the study is that the developmental trajectories of children with and without reading disabilities start to diverge around 18 months, rather than at 5 or 6 years old as previously assumed.
But a wide gap stands between the time children are identified as having a reading impairment and the start of intensive intervention. Most school districts in the U.S. employ a “wait-to-fail” approach. Many children are only flagged by the school system after they have failed to learn to read over a prolonged period of time — often years — even though there’s evidence that reading intervention is most effective earlier. The experience of failure can erode self-esteem, Gaab says, and lead to the higher rates of anxiety and depression that are found in struggling readers.
The study, “Longitudinal Trajectories of Brain Development from Infancy to School Age and Their Relationship with Literacy Development,” is the first to track brain development from infancy to childhood focused literacy skills.
Over a decade, Gaab and co-authors Ted Turesky, Elizabeth Escalante and Megan Loh conducted MRI brain scans of 130 study participants starting at 3 months old. Half had a risk of dyslexia, with either an older sibling or one or both parents diagnosed with dyslexia, which can increase a child’s risk of reading challenges. For the first year of the study, the babies peacefully slept through the scan, tucked into the MRI machine wearing noise protection.
At 18 months old, the babies came back for another scan. By the time the babies were toddlers, the researchers took a break. The children returned when they were a more cooperative 4 years old and every year after until age 10.
The study also assessed such factors as cognitive abilities, literacy environment and home language. Funded by the NIH, the researchers aim to continue for another five years and follow the participants into high school.
Babies are born with the raw material they need to hear, see, move and remember. The nerve fibers, or axons, that connect these disparate brain regions don’t grow automatically. They are cultivated by babies’ environments. MRIs of the participants as infants showed predictably smaller brains that appear more solid or smooth in the images. By the time the children were 5, the scans showed a robust network of branching pathways of these nerve fibers, said coauthor Turesky.
“The infant brain is very different compared to all other stages of life,” he says. “But if you look at the scan of a child at 5 years and then at 10 years, you can see there’s hardly any change in [those pathways]. Those early years are a time of very rapid growth.”
The human brain remains plastic and mutable for a lifetime, Turesky says, but the scans emphasize that earliest years are the busiest for building brain architecture. This has important policy implications for early intervention and improved literacy curricula in preschools.
Some brains are better equipped to build the neural scaffolding that ultimately leads to reading, Gaab says, and some brains are less optimized. Those children might struggle to read. “They’re built differently, and they’re optimized for other things, because every brain is different,” she says. “But it does point to the need for good early pre-reading instruction and games and good oral language input, and home and school environment interactions that we know build these connections. Some brains just need more of the good stuff.”
“Call it preventative education, just like preventative medicine,” she says. “Help these kids build these connections before they struggle and prevent them ever seeing a special educator or ever getting a dyslexia diagnosis.” A large number of studies now show that early intervention and prevention lead to better outcomes for children at risk of dyslexia, Gaab says, and the research created major policy changes aimed at early identification and intervention.
This includes teaching specific skills that can close the gap between proficient and struggling readers. Those skills include phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming, and vocabulary and oral language comprehension. This teaching takes place naturally when caregivers read aloud to their children. Reach Out and Read, a nonprofit, has a network of clinicians who work directly with pediatric care providers to help them integrate read-aloud experiences into their interactions with parents and provides developmentally appropriate books for caregivers to take home.
“We know that the developing brain is shaped most of all by the interactions with the adults taking care of that child, says Perri Klass, the national medical director of Reach Out and Read. “The wonderful thing about this study is that it literally looks at the building of the brain and says very clearly that it’s not just that the brain is being built, but the specific structures that will allow the child to read.”
If doctors can identify young children who are going to struggle more with learning to read as they get older, they can target those families with books and other support early on, Klass adds.
Klass says no one needs to tell parents to “teach” this idea to their children. The children will sort it out if they grow up around books and reading. A baby doesn’t want or need an authority on literacy to walk through the door and teach them how to read, Klass says. A baby wants their parent’s voice, presence and back-and-forth interactions.
“Your baby wants to be on your lap hearing you read. Your baby will love books because your baby loves you.”
The 74
