Is Your Child’s Brain Fast Enough to Read?

The Amazing Reading Brain – If Processing Is Fast Enough

The brain can make every word a “sight word” when language processing skills are good. But what if they’re not?

Reading feels like a visual skill. We see a child learn the letters of the alphabet and scan words. However, science tells us that reading is a language skill. The human brain uses the circuitry for spoken language to process text.

How We Read – The Computer Brain

Reading is an amazing human skill. Here’s how it works:

1. First, the brain learns language (words and meaning) by listening and stores it in word memory
2. As the brain comes across text words, it maps them to the matching word in word memory
3. Reading is the brain seeing text, connecting to word memory, and then attaching meaning

Amazingly, the brain can be a computer that connects every word it hears to the text, a process called “mapping,” effectively making every word a so-called sight word.

This requires a lightning-fast processing speed that adds “pixels” to the sound waves, making every sound in every word crystal clear. When processing speed is low, the sounds are muddier, much like a low-resolution image.

Why The Computer Reading Brain Struggles

When the computer brain is working properly, reading is as automatic as listening, and reading comprehension is as easy as listening comprehension.

For many, though, reading is not automatic. It’s slow and/or exhausting, and the effort to focus on reading the words detracts from comprehension. It’s hard to read for long periods, and reading for pleasure is rare.

For struggling readers, the problem is underdeveloped language processing.

This matters in reading, as the brain can only map words it hears with crystal clarity. If the match is not perfect, the connection between text and word memory is not formed. Crystal clarity requires sufficient processing speed to provide the “sound pixels” needed to pick out every sound in every word, perfectly.

Problem: Processing Needs to Be Lightning Fast for Language

Despite additional instruction and various methods, 30% of American 8th graders cannot read at a basic level (according to the NAEP report), and 69% are not “proficient.” The reason reading is hard for many is that processing at natural-language speed is difficult.

The “Sweet Spot”: For perfect phonemic clarity, the human auditory system needs to resolve changes in the sound wave every 10 to 20 milliseconds (50-100 sounds per second). If processing lags beyond 40 milliseconds (25 sounds per second), phonemes become indistinguishable, and listening becomes a guessing game.

The only task faster than this is the brain’s ability to determine where a sound comes from using interaural time difference – when sound reaches one ear before the other.

By contrast, listening to whole words requires processing 4-6 syllables per second. Children with speech delays process at a slower rate than the 4-6-syllable threshold and are also at risk of being poor readers.

However, many more children are in the middle zone – processing fast enough not to have speech and language issues, but not fast enough for phonemic awareness.

Dichotic listening refers to the brain’s ability to filter out distracting noise to focus on another sound stream. This requires processing 20-50 sounds per second, making the inability to filter out noisy backgrounds a common symptom of APD (auditory processing disorder).

More on auditory processing disorder here and language processing disorder here.

It’s a little cruel that arguably one of life’s most important skills, reading, relies on being able to process at these amazing speeds. It’s no wonder so many struggle.

Slow Processing Undermines Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to pick out sounds inside a word. This needs to be not only accurate – so that the mapping to oral word memory can happen – but also automatic and effortless. Only then can decoding be automatic, clearing the mind for comprehension and higher-level thinking while reading.

If processing is not 100%, e.g., if “jump” is heard as “jum,” then the brain can’t map it. When you see “jump” when reading, you will rely on context, but it slows you down and diverts brain effort needed for comprehension.

The problem is that because “jum” and “jump” don’t match, they will never be mapped. And so every time you come across “jump,” you need to use context to guess it. Multiply that by thousands of words that are not mapped, and you have dyslexia.

Slow Processing Limits Metalinguistic Development

Metalinguistics is the higher-level ability to think, truly understand, and manipulate language, its rules, patterns, and nuances. It’s that deep understanding of language, e.g., knowing that “he singed a song” is not right even if you’re not quite sure why.

Once you have metalinguistic ability, you can understand the syntax, grammar, and intricacies of your native language: how nuances and inferences beyond meaning are conveyed, and how meaning can be changed by rearranging words. This is a foundation for reading comprehension with metacognition.

Metalinguistics is learned from listening to and observing your language with an analytical ear. That requires efficient language processing, efficient enough to be able to hear the words and then think about them.

That won’t happen if processing isn’t developed, and that affects your ability to understand what you read.

Slow Processing Limits Vocabulary

Even in building vocabulary, language processing and reading are connected.

In the “Simple View of Reading,” listening comprehension is identified as a primary factor in individual differences in linguistic proficiency (Hogan et al., 2014). When language processing and, therefore, listening are inefficient, the brain fails to build the vocabulary needed for reading comprehension.

If a word is not clearly heard, it is not stored in word memory, and no meaning is attached. Vocabulary does not build. Or a word is misheard and stored incorrectly – /jump/ and /jum/ – which is no help to the child when reading.

The Domino Effect: Why Comprehension Suffers

When reading is automatic, it’s effortless. A child’s brain should treat reading a storybook exactly like listening to a parent tell a bedtime story.

For a child with dyslexia or processing delays, reading is high-stakes manual labor. Because the “sound pixels” are fuzzy, the brain has to work overtime. The text is not 100% mapped to word memory, and sounding-out skills are compromised.

The child uses context clues, looks at the pictures for hints, or guesses based on the first letter. On an fMRI scan, this is represented as scattered activity all over the hard-working brain, whereas a good reader shows activity only in the language regions.

Imagine trying to watch a cartoon where the audio is out of sync, and the image is pixelated. You could probably figure out the plot, but you’d be tired and frustrated within minutes. That is what reading feels like for these children. They spend so much effort decoding the word at the end of the sentence that they’ve forgotten the word at the beginning.

This is why a child can read a paragraph out loud but have no idea what happened in the story. And the reason many struggling readers either resist reading or can only read for short periods.

Our Solution – Speed Up Processing

Fast ForWord software works directly on the primary engine of literacy: auditory processing speed. Faster processing, more words heard clearly, more words mapped (more “sight” words), and so reading is easier. Instead of just asking a child to try harder, our reading programs provide “brain gym” exercises that train processing skills in tiny steps, adding speed and complexity at the student’s pace.

• Accurate Listening. By slowing down the sounds of English, we help the child’s brain finally hear those sounds clearly. Then we speed up, so that  “jump” is heard as /j/ /u/ /m/ /p/ every single time.
• Mapping to Text. Once the sounds are heard, the brain stores the word in word memory and gradually maps it to the written form, turning it into a “sight word.”
• Catching Up. We then build other skills that were held back while the language processing delay persisted. This includes attentiveness and working memory, and reading-specific skills such as vocabulary, grammar, and spelling.
• Comprehension. Students come to us with a reading approach focused on deciphering the words. However, reading with comprehension requires thinking about what you are reading. We rewire that reading approach, getting readers to tap into their new automatic decoding skills to think while reading.

Start with our free reading assessment to find out where your child’s reading stands or read more about reading interventions here.