Why young children can learn new things so quickly
If you’re the parent of a school-aged child you will be reminded at how illogical the English language is. Children can often learn words such as cat, sat, hat, extremely quickly, but when it comes to “tricky words” (a word that cannot be sounded out phonetically) like thought, the, she, down… and so on, they have to learn specific rules. Unsurprisingly there’s so much going on in the brain as they do so. Brain connections are strengthened each time something new is learned. I’ve recently been looking into how the brain changes as kids learn to read – and what this helps us understand.
What’s apparent is the brain has an automatic system and a very different rule-based system when it comes to learning patterns about the world – and not just for reading. Amazingly, the different systems can be used interchangeably if we train ourselves to do so. I’m producing a documentary that will show how we can mould our brain to learn in different ways, which can hopefully improve memory abilities along the way (stay tuned).
But for now, I covered some fascinating research on how we use a different process to read when the brain is most malleable, and for those who learn to read later than normal, it becomes tricker. This doesn’t suggest we should all be learning as early as some countries do (kids in the UK start at 4, whereas it’s about 7 in Finland), but what we know is that those who learn later (aged 10) can find it harder than 7 year olds - revealing interesting patterns in the brain as to why. As researcher Anna Cunningham told me last year: "It doesn't matter whether you start to read at four or five or six as long as the method they are taught is a good, evidenced method.”
Literacy is so interesting interesting to look at because reading and writing are not skills that were part of our evolution. Still, scientists often say the brain is ‘primed’ for language (and literacy), but by that they mean we are primed to pick up and learn complicated patterns. We were just smart enough to develop literacy along the way. I don’t often cover neuroscience in this blog, but I find how the brain works fascinating, so here’s a snippet of my recent post, published in Bold:
Children learn to read at varying speeds, and reading is taught at different ages around the world. Given this diversity, are there ways for neuroscientists to help educators better support children? To understand more about how literacy develops and what effect it has on other skills, researchers are investigating what happens in the brain both before and after kids learn to read.
Kaja Jasińska, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, looks at the neurobiology of language and literacy to understand the various environmental contexts that shape how children learn to read and subsequent differences in the brain. For example, she and her colleagues examined literacy levels of children in Côte d’Ivoire, where the age of access to formal education varies, in an effort to understand how children are affected when they don’t learn to read until they are 10 or older.
The team used a form of non-invasive brain scanning called functional near infrared spectroscopy to measure the areas of the brain that were more active when 10- to 12-year-olds were reading or trying to read.
They found that when looking at actual words, rather than scribbles, children who were able to read words showed more activity in brain areas associated with language processing. The team’s work, currently still in preparation, shows that brain activity was different in children who struggled to read individual letters. This group showed more activity in the left prefrontal cortex, which is important for language, when looking at scribbles than when looking at words.
It is interesting to note that the pattern of brain activity is different in younger children who are at a similar stage of learning to read letters. Six-year-old children show more activity when viewing scribbles than when looking at words, but only in the occipital cortex, which is associated with visual processing. This suggests, Jasińska explains, that the brains of later readers may be working harder to differentiate between real letters and scribbles and to interpret printed materials. More competent readers are quickly able to comprehend what is written language and what is not.
There’s a reason why the age at which we learn to read matters. Older children tend to have superior memory skills, which support reading, but their brains have less neural plasticity for reading – less ability to adapt and change – than the brains of younger children. “When you’re 10 to 12, you might have a little less plasticity for reading,” says Jasińska.
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