Chennai: After analysing brain scans of newborns, a new study has said humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read.
The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports. Researchers explain that this part of the brainācalled the ‘visual word form area’ (VWFA)āis connected to the language network of the brain.
Zeynep Saygin, senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at the Ohio State University, says, “That makes it fertile ground to develop a sensitivity to visual wordsāeven before any exposure to language.”
The VWFA is specialised 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 cortex that are sensitive to seeing faces, scenes or other objects, and only becomes selective to words and letters as children learn to read or at least as they learn language.
Saygin said, “We found that isn’t true. Even at birth, the VWFA is more connected functionally to the language network of the brain than it is to other areas. It is an incredibly exciting finding.”
A core faculty member of Ohio State’s Chronic Brain Injury Program, Saygin conducted the study with graduate students Jin Li and Heather Hansen and assistant professor David Osher, all in psychology at Ohio State.
The researchers analysed fMRI scans of the brains of 40 newborns, all less than a week old, who were part of the Developing Human Connectome Project. They compared these to similar scans from 40 adults who participated in the separate Human Connectome Project.
The VWFA is next to another part of visual cortex that processes faces, and it was reasonable to believe that there wasn’t any difference in these parts of the brain in newborns, Saygin said.
As visual objects, faces have some of the same properties as words do, such as needing high spatial resolution for humans to see them correctly.
“It’s interesting to think about 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 emphasised the role of already having brain connections at birth to help develop functional specialisation, even for an experience-dependent category like reading.”