Humans are born with a neighborhood of the brain that's prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to find out the way to read, a replacement study suggests.
Analyzing brain scans of newborns, researchers found that this a part of the brain -- called the "visual form area" (VWFA) -- is connected to the language network of the brain.
"That makes it fertile ground to develop a sensitivity to visual words -- even before any exposure to language," said Zeynep Saygin, senior author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.
The VWFA is specialized for reading only in literate individuals. Some researchers had hypothesized that the pre-reading VWFA starts out being no different than other parts of the visual area that are sensitive to seeing faces, scenes or other objects, and only becomes selective to words and letters as children learn to read or a minimum of as they learn language.
"We found that may not true. Even at birth, the VWFA is more connected functionally to the language network of the brain than it's to other areas," Saygin said. "It is an incredibly exciting finding."
Saygin, who may be a core academician of Ohio State's Chronic Brain Injury Program, conducted the study with graduate students Jin Li and Heather Hansen and professor David Osher, beat psychology at Ohio State. Their results were published today within the journal Scientific Reports.
The researchers analyzed fMRI scans of the brains of 40 newborns, all but every week old, who were a part of the Developing Human Connectome Project. They compared these to similar scans from 40 adults who participated within the separate Human Connectome Project.
The VWFA is next to a different a part of visual area that processes faces, and it had been reasonable to believe that there wasn't any difference in these parts of the brain in newborns, Saygin said.
As visual objects, faces have a number of an equivalent properties as words do, like needing high spatial resolution for humans to ascertain them correctly.
But the researchers found that, even in newborns, the VWFA was different from the a part of the visual area that recognizes faces, primarily due to its functional connection to the language processing a part of the brain.
"The VWFA is specialized to ascertain words even before we're exposed to them," Saygin said.
"It's interesting to believe how and why our brains develop functional modules that are sensitive to specific things like faces, objects, and words," said Li, who is lead author of the study.
"Our study really emphasized the role of already having brain connections at birth to assist develop functional specialization, even for an experience-dependent category like reading."
The study did find some differences within the VWFA in newborns and adults.
"Our findings suggest that there likely must be further refinement within the VWFA as babies mature," Saygin said.
"Experience with spoken and written communication will likely strengthen connections with specific aspects of the language circuit and further differentiate this region's function from its neighbors as an individual gains literacy."
Saygin's lab at Ohio State is currently scanning the brains of 3- and 4-year-olds to find out more about what the VWFA does before children learn to read and what visual properties the region is aware of .
The goal is to find out how the brain becomes a reading brain, she said. Learning more about individual variability may help researchers understand differences in reading behavior and will be useful within the study of dyslexia and other developmental disorders.
"Knowing what this region is doing at this early age will tell us a touch more about how the human brain can develop the power to read and what may fail ," Saygin said. "It is vital to trace how this region of the brain becomes increasingly specialized."
The research was supported partially by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Analyses were completed using the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
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