Infant brains are prewired for reading, study finds

Researchers have discovered that infant brains have an innate structure prewired to read words and letters, connected closely to the brain's language region.

They discovered that the infant brain area, which develops into the visual word form area (VWFA), has patterns of connectivity to the language brain region similar to the patterns found in adults. The infant brains were scanned within a week of birth using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The work by an Ohio State University research team was published in the journal Scientific Reports on Oct. 22.

Senior author of the study, Zeynep Saygin, told Current Science Daily that although the researchers’ previous work “suggested that there may be privileged connections of the VWFA with language areas, we weren't sure if we would see similar results in newborns, who still have somewhat blurry vision and of course can’t read.”

“We found evidence of these privileged connections of the VWFA with language areas even in neonates but also found that there needs to be further refinement of this cortical tissue as a child gains literacy,” Saygin said.

The study tested the Connectivity Hypothesis, which holds that the function of each brain area is “largely shaped” by how it connects with other parts of the brain. The connectivity is innately there, even before the function — in this case, reading — has developed.

The researchers compared functional connectivity of the brain’s language regions to nearby regions with similar visual functions: face-selective, scene-selective and object-selective regions. They found that the VWFA area differed from adjoining regions in the infant brain responsible for recognizing faces, scenes or objects.

They also found that infants and adults had similar functional connectivity patterns, with the highest connectivity between the VWFA and language regions of the brain. Whether this kind of preprogrammed connectivity holds up for other brain functions “remains to be tested,” the researchers state.

What led the researchers to think that there might be a pre-connection to reading in the brains of newborns?

“The reading area is a visual region that responds to a person’s native orthography, and it’s found in approximately the same place in every literate individual, regardless of language or other factors,” Saygin, an assistant professor of psychology, told Current Science Daily. “It changes in exact size and location but it’s in approximately the same spot. This systematicity of neural specialization led us to hypothesize that there is something in this brain tissue that makes it hot ‘real estate’ for reading."

As to why this might be the case, Saygin said, “It could be the types of neurons, it could be the wiring pattern of that piece of cortex, or both.”

Continuing research will attempt to clarify how the VWFA develops with child growth, with the aim of perhaps helping research in reading disorders, such as dyslexia.