We All Speed-Read
When children first learn to read, they painstakingly sound out every letter—C-A-T—before mentally stringing them together and connecting the result to a word and its meaning. With practice, however, we begin to recognize words on sight. In fact, our brain compiles a visual dictionary that is housed in the rear temporal lobe, adjacent to the area that recognizes faces, according to a new study published in Neuroimage. This dictionary eventually supersedes the responsibilities of the brain’s phonics center, the researchers say, and is critical to becoming an advanced reader. Laurie Glezer, a postdoctoral research fellow at San Diego State University, and her colleagues analyzed the brain activity of 27 participants—all native, monolingual English speakers reading at an advanced level—as they read homophones, words that sound alike but have a different…
Link to Full Article: We All Speed-Read
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