Wired for Words: God’s Design for Language and Learning

We know God created speech and language! After all, in Genesis 1 God speaks the universe to life. God created humankind with the natural ability to communicate through speaking and listening, and the ability for humans to invent written language and reading. The earliest records of reading and writing occurred in Mesopotamia in approximately 3500 BC (Woods, 2010).

We live in a world that often values speaking over listening. Understanding the process of learning to read reminds me of the importance of attending to and truly engaging with the voices and stories of others. While speech allows us to express ourselves, reading trains us to listen before we respond and to seek understanding before offering opinions. In that way, reading is not just a cognitive task, but also invites us into the habit of humility.

As adults, reading may feel effortless. Words are all around us and we can’t stop the reading we do. We are surrounded by language in all of our lives. We read texts and social media. We communicate with family, friends, and colleagues every day. But have you ever observed a young learner putting all of the pieces of language together as reading skills develop? It is an amazing process!

Seeing symbols of written language and transforming them into words and sentences that carry meaning is amazing. Reading is a complex process that engages multiple regions of the brain, and researchers continue to study it in depth. I will try to explain our current understanding of what happens in our brains when we read.

Once we become fluent readers, the steps in the process seem to happen unconsciously and it is difficult to not read words we encounter! Researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track brain activity during reading and have discovered that fluent readers activate different brain pathways when reading than developing readers or readers with dyslexia (Honig, 2018). In other words, learning to read changes your brain.

When children are born, they have the capacity to learn any language. As they hear language, infants are learning to differentiate and identify the speech sounds they hear. They learn to recognize patterns that they hear more frequently and begin to form tacit rules about how language works (Werker & Tees, 2002). As they begin to babble, four to six month-old infants are building muscles in their mouth and tongue. They are learning to control the placement of their tongue to produce particular sounds. Through the next two years of life, they learn to speak and understand language. By age five, children develop an understanding of grammatical structures of language including sentence structure and vocabulary.

Early language experiences are foundational in setting the stage for reading and writing. High quality literacy-rich environments impact a child’s understanding and development of language. When parents engage with children in conversation, they build language comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. Children learn how language works and practice communicating with others. When parents read books to children, children are exposed to new and interesting concepts and vocabulary. Books bring the world into our homes! Although these activities do not teach children to read, they are important for building language comprehension, including background knowledge, enriching vocabulary, and sentence structure and syntax.

The speech and language processing areas of the brain need to be integrated. This is why phonological awareness is so important. Young readers need to be able to hear and process the different sounds in language (Gentry, 2019). I would argue that this understanding of speech and how sounds work together to form words is actually the first step in reading.

It may be helpful to think of reading as a circuit of connections in the left hemisphere of the brain. All four lobes of the brain are involved in the complex process of reading (Dehaene, 2013). It may seem to be a step-by-step process, but proficient reading happens within milliseconds, and many of the processes described here appear to happen almost simultaneously (Gentry, 2019).

Reading instruction helps learners connect their spoken language to written text. A key part of this process is the ability to recognize and decipher letter shapes and letter sequences, a task that primarily involves the occipital lobe. The brain builds on existing neural pathways that have similar jobs to accomplish this task. For example, the pathways that help us recognize faces are adapted to helping us recognize letters and strings of letters that form words. A specialized region known as the brain’s “letter box,” or the visual word form area (VWFA), located at the intersection of the occipital and temporal lobes, learns to recognize individual letters as well as letter patterns (Dehaene, 2013). Interestingly, while numbers and shapes also begin as visual inputs, they do not activate the VWFA, instead they are activated by different regions of the brain (Eide, 2022). As readers become more skilled and fluent, the VWFA specializes in storing and processing visual representations of print, including letters, common letter sequences, and even whole words (Dehaene and Cohen 2011; Kim, 2017). When developing readers struggle with letter reversals, such as substituting b for d, it is likely this part of the brain is involved. Because of its essential role in recognizing written language, the VWFA is critical for both reading and spelling.

After letter recognition, the neural activity shifts from the VWFA in the back of the brain forward to the phonological areas, including Broca's area in the frontal lobe. In this area, the brain works to connect phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters or letter groups). It is crucial that the reader has developed the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words, which is known as phonemic awareness, in order to make these connections. Proficient readers blend letters into words almost effortlessly. When readers are unable to hear sounds in words and manipulate sounds in words, they often struggle to read (National Center on Improving Literacy, 2022). Developing readers may read sound by sound or struggle to blend words as they read or they may struggle to segment words into sounds as they write. When a developing reader is focusing on each sound in words, it takes a lot of mental energy, and their comprehension usually suffers.

As sounds and letters are connected, the reading process shifts to Wernicke’s area and other language comprehension areas. Wernicke's area, in the temporal lobe, is crucial in recognizing and interpreting speech sounds and retrieving the meaning of vocabulary and other semantic features of language. This area helps readers connect background knowledge to the reading content. It helps the reader understand grammatical sentence structures and how words relate to each other in a sentence (Cherry, 2023). Turning strings of letters into words and vocabulary that can be understood is an important part of being able to read. In doing this, the brain builds new neural pathways connecting different areas of the brain. These pathways linking different areas of the brain are important for comprehension, connecting sound to meaning, and phonological memory. The stronger these pathways are, the more efficient the brain is at processing written language (Gentry, 2019). One might think of this as a filing system. The more organized the files, the easier it is to retrieve the information. When the information pathways are not as highly organized, retrieval is more difficult. We all can relate to trying to find something quickly and getting frustrated because it isn’t organized well. When the brain recognizes and decodes words and connects them to language comprehension, we get reading comprehension. Memory and retrieval play a key role in helping readers become fluent.

When a person learns to read, the network for spoken language also changes. Speaking and writing are both known as expressive language skills. Writing and speaking activate the same areas of the brain (Dehaene, 2013). This network actually decreases in activity when a person is able to read. Readers are able to understand a spoken sentence using less brain activity than non-readers (Dehaene, 2013). This confirms that “reading facilitates the comprehension of complex sentences” (Dehaene, 2013).

God created humans with the capacity to learn and grow. The brain’s ability to grow and change is called neural plasticity (Mateos-Aparicio, 2019). The more neural pathways are used, the stronger they become. So as a child’s ability to read becomes more automatic, the neural pathways between these areas (and others especially related to memory) become stronger (Houston, 2014). When a person has dyslexia or another reading difficulty, we recognize it as a neurological difference. The areas of their brains used for reading are different from those of proficient readers. Retrieving stored information may be challenging. Developing readers and people with dyslexia likely need different instruction (more intense, explicit, and multisensory) in order to build those pathways and develop those parts of the brain. Strengthening the neural pathways between different brain regions through targeted instruction helps children become successful readers. Understanding how the brain functions and changes as reading is learned is helpful for developing targeted interventions to help developing readers. It also reminds me to stand in awe of our Creator God who created all things!

Recognizing the complexity of reading and the neurological differences among learners reminds us to approach each child, student, or neighbor with patience, empathy, and dignity. Understanding how the brain learns to read doesn’t just increase our admiration for God’s design; it also shapes how we love and serve others. Literacy, often taken for granted, is a powerful tool that opens the door to knowledge, opportunity, and the flourishing God intended for each of us.

References:

• Cherry, K. (2023, April 7). How the Wernicke's Area of the Brain Functions. Very Well Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/wernickes-area-2796017#:~:text=Wernicke's%20area%20is%20the%20region,3
• Dehaene, S. (2013, June). Inside the Letterbox: How Literacy Transforms the Human Brain. Cerebrum. http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=43644
• Dehaene, S., & Cohen, L. The unique role of the visual word form area in reading. Trends in the Cognitive Sciences, 15(6), 254-262.
• Eide, D. (2022). How your brain learns to read. Rochester, MN: Logic of English, Inc.
• Gentry, J. R., & Ouellette, G. P. (2019). Brain words how the science of reading informs teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse.
• Honig, B., Diamond, L., Gutlohn, L. (2018). Teaching reading sourcebook (3rd ed.). : Consortium on Reading Excellence in Education, Inc. (CORE).
• Houston, S. M., Lebel, C., Katzir, T., Manis, F. R., Kan, E., Rodriguez, G. R., Sowell, E. R. (2014, March 26). Reading skills and structural brain development. National Institute of Health.
• Kim, J., Kanjlia, S., Merabet, L., Bedny, M. (2017, November 22). Development of the Visual Word Form Area Requires Visual Experience: Evidence from Blind Braille Readers. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(47), 11495-11504. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0997-17.2017
• Mateos-Aparicio, P., & Rodriguez-Moreno, A. (2019). The impact of studying brain plasticity. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncel.2019.00066/full
• National Center on Improving Literacy. (2022). Phonemic Awareness: What Is It and Why Is It Important? https://www.improvingliteracy.org/resource/phonemic-awareness-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-important
• Werker, J., & Tees, R. C. Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 25(1), 121-133.
• Woods, Christopher (2010), "The earliest Mesopotamian writing", in Woods, Christopher (ed.), Visible language. Inventions of writing in the ancient Middle East and beyond (PDF), Oriental Institute Museum Publications, vol. 32, Chicago: University of Chicago, pp. 33–50, ISBN 978-1-885923-76-9