Reading instruction causes changes in category-selective visual cortex.

Education sculpts specialized neural circuits for skills like reading that are critical to success in modern society but were not anticipated by the selective pressures of evolution. Does the emergence of brain regions that selectively process novel visual stimuli like words occur at the expense of cortical representations of other stimuli like faces and objects? "Neuronal Recycling" predicts that learning to read should enhance the response to words in ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC) and decrease the response to other visual categories such as faces and objects. To test this hypothesis, and more broadly to understand the changes that are induced by the early stages of literacy instruction, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with pre-school children (five years of age). Children were randomly assigned to intervention programs focused on either reading skills or oral language skills and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data collected before and after the intervention was used to measure visual responses to images of text, faces, and objects. We found that being taught reading versus oral language skills induced different patterns of change in category-selective regions of visual cortex, but that there was not a clear tradeoff between the response to words versus other categories. Within a predefined region of VOTC corresponding to the visual word form area (VWFA) we found that the relative amplitude of responses to text, faces, and objects changed, but increases in the response to words were not linked to decreases in the response to faces or objects. How these changes play out over a longer timescale is still unknown but, based on these data, we can surmise that high-level visual cortex undergoes rapid changes as children enter school and begin establishing new skills like literacy.

Can an Online Reading Camp Teach 5-Year-Old Children to Read?

Literacy is an essential skill. Learning to read is a requirement for becoming a self-providing human being. However, while spoken language is acquired naturally with exposure to language without explicit instruction, reading and writing need to be taught explicitly. Decades of research have shown that well-structured teaching of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and letter-to-sound mapping is crucial in building solid foundations for the acquisition of reading. During the COVID-19 pandemic, children worldwide did not have access to consistent and structured teaching and are, as a consequence, predicted to be behind in the development of their reading skills. Subsequent evidence confirms this prediction. With the best evidence-based practice in mind, we developed an online version of a well-structured early literacy training program (Reading Camp) for 5-year-old children. This 2-week online Reading Camp program is designed for pre-K children. It incorporates critical components of the fundamental skills essential to learning to read and is taught online in an interactive, multi-sensory, and peer-learning environment. We measure the participants' literacy skills and other related skills before and after participating in the online Reading Camp and compare the results to no-treatment controls. Results show that children who participated in the online Reading Camp improved significantly on all parameters in relation to controls. Our results demonstrate that a well-structured evidence-based reading instruction program, even if online and short-term, benefits 5-year-old children in learning to read. With the potential to scale up this online program, the evidence presented here, alongside previous evidence for the efficacy of the in-person program, indicates that the online Reading Camp program is effective and can be used to tackle a variety of questions regarding structural and functional plasticity in the early stages of reading acquisition.