Kendra Perry's Profile

In the 1990s, the Shaywitzes had used fMRI to learn that reading
ability resides in the brain's left half, or hemisphere. Within
the hemisphere, three brain regions work together to control reading.
In the left front of the brain, one area recognizes phonemes. Further
back, another brain area "maps" phonemes to the letters
that represent them. Still another brain area serves as a kind of
long-term storage system. Once a word is learned, this brain region
recognizes it automatically, without first having to decipher it
phonetically.

Poor readers, the researchers had learned in the earlier studies,
have difficulty accessing this automatic recognition center. Instead,
they rely almost exclusively on the phoneme center and the mapping
center. Each time poor readers see a word, they must puzzle over
it, as if they were seeing it for the first time.

Dr. Sally
Shaywitz: After they've read a word correctly a number of times -- no one knows exactly
how many times, some people think four or six, and it probably varies for each
child -- but have read a word over and over again correctly -- and that's the
key, correctly -- then that the word becomes automatic, and they just need to
look at it and they automatically recognize it. That's where that occipital
temporal region becomes involved. So it's really that occipital temporal region
that is critical because it's that same ventral stream on the left side of the
brain.
So this particular area on the left side of the brain, the word forming area,
is the area that we and others believe serves the expertise in reading. That's
very, very important because when you can read a word fluently it's read
automatically. That means you don't have to devote conscious attention to it.
And unless you can read words fluently, you're not going to enjoy reading.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: It's hard work. That why I think so many people
misunderstand what a struggling reader is all about. It's not that they can't
read. That may happen, but it's very rare. But it's how much effort they have to
put into it.

David Boulton: The bandwidth they're consuming to do the processing
to get to that level of fluency that can allow them to run.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right.