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The brains of children who read poorly begin to function like the brains of good readers following a highly intensive reading-intervention program, a new brain-imaging study says.

Earlier research has shown that poor-reading children tend to underuse parts of the brain's left hemisphere that process language, and sometimes may rely more on parts of the brain's right hemisphere, compared with normal readers.

The new findings suggest that intensive reading-intervention programs that focus on teaching phonological awareness to help children read better work in part by training children to use their brains in the manner that good readers do.

Neural-System Effect

The study is one of the first to show the effect a reading-intervention program has on the neural system, said Sally Shaywitz, lead author of the study and a professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine. The research, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, studied 77 children, age six to nine. In that group, 49 had difficulty reading and 28 were good readers. The good readers were used as the control group. Of the poor readers, 12 received the standard intervention used in a normal school setting, such as special education and tutoring. The rest of the poor readers received the intensive reading program that included individual tutoring that focused on teaching children phonics, letters and combinations of letters that represent discrete sounds used in speech.

Children receiving the intensive reading program were recruited from schools near Syracuse, N.Y. The other readers came from the New Haven, Conn., area.

Researchers found that after an average of 105 hours of tutoring, the children in the intensive reading program read more accurately and with more fluency. Moreover, functional magnetic-resonance imaging revealed that the activity in the brains of children in the intensive intervention group continued to resemble the normal activity found in good readers a year after the experimental intervention had concluded.

The brains of the poor readers receiving normal school interventions didn't show the same change in brain activity.

Fixing Disabilities

The findings build on earlier brain-imaging studies of poor readers who were exposed to similar reading-intervention programs. The fact that the brain-activity patterns changed to resemble those of normal readers following the intervention signifies that reading disabilities can be fixed, said Andrew Papanicolaou, professor and director of the division of clinical neurosciences at the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center.

Lori Matthews, a parent, said she was "devastated" when her daughter Talia's school wanted to hold her back from the third grade in 1996. Talia began receiving F's in school after Mrs. Matthews moved the family to Syracuse from California. Mrs. Matthews soon learned that her daughter couldn't read, she says. However, Talia did qualify for Dr. Shaywitz's study and was soon enrolled. As a result, Talia learned to read and now receives A's and B's, Mrs. Matthews says.

Before the intervention, "It was really hard when you go to school and you can't read, " says Talia, who is now 14 years old. "Now it's really easier for me."

Sally Shaywitz is a neuroscientist and professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine, Sally Shaywitz, along with her husband, Bennett Shaywitz, is codirector of the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention. For 30 years, she has focused on understanding the brain mechanisms involved in reading.

What do we really know about how the brain learns to read?

We know that whereas speaking is natural, reading is not. Children do not automatically read. They have to learn how to do it. Through tens of thousands of years of evolution, men and women have developed the abilities to speak, to hear, and to listen. Every society has some form of spoken language. Put a baby in a speaking environment and that child will learn to speak. We don't have to teach children how to talk. As Stephen Pinker says, language is instinctive. But reading isn't. Reading is a recent development. Not every society reads. There isn't a little reading center in the brain. Humans haven't evolved that way. The neurocircuitry isn't set up to allow us to read.

But humans do have the capacity to read.

Over time, we have learned to use our neurocircuitry to read. The brain system that lends itself to reading is the language system. To read, a child has to use this wonderful, enriched, and robust language system to somehow get meaning from print. To do that, a child has to somehow transcode that print into language.

Are you saying that in order to read, we have to adapt, or train, our brain to perform in ways it wasn't naturally designed to work?

In essence, yes. We acquire the ability to do many things that we aren't born knowing how to do. Children have to develop the awareness that words are made up of sounds. And that print represents these sounds, or phonemes. For example, the word bat really has three phonemes, b, a, and t, so children have to develop this awareness. And then they have to develop the understanding that the letters on the page—the b, the a, and the t—represent these units of sound. When children reach this level of awareness, they're ready to learn to read. For some children, it's easy; for others, it's very difficult.