Neuroscientists have long known that the brain’s circuitry changes when people learn to read, but they know much less about how teaching specifically influences those changes.
Now Bruce McCandliss at Stanford University and colleagues from New York and Texas have found what they say are the “footprints of instruction” in the electrical brain wave patterns of young adults who were taught words of a made-up language.
The researchers discovered that the way their subjects were taught the new words affected how efficiently their brains conjured them up a day later and whether they could learn new words on their own.
When the subjects recalled the words they had learned by sounding them out, they activated circuity in the brain’s left hemisphere commonly used by skilled readers to identify words in a fraction of a second.
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But when the subjects recalled words they had simply memorized, they showed less efficient activation patterns.
McCandliss and his co-authors — Yuliya Yoncheva at New York University and Jessica Wise at the University of Texas at Austin — say it’s one of the first experiments to show the effect of a specific teaching technique on brain development.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
