when I was learning to read?

Hey guys. Julia here for DNews

According to a study by the Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy

32 million American adults can’t read. More than most developed nations, so what’s going on?

Is our education system failing us? Or is it our language?

Here in the states most students begin to learn to read in kindergarten, learning the

alphabet, turning those letters into sounds and then working their way up to whole words.

But learning to read is a very long complicated process.

One of the keys to being able to read is Automatic word processing. It’s basically how the

brain decides a group of symbols is actually a word within milliseconds.

One study published in the journal Developmental Science found that this process happens around

fourth and fifth grade. But for some the process is much longer.

Researchers had participants look at a list of words, fake words that looked like real words,

and strings of random symbols. They found that for most people, no matter their

age knew the difference between real words and not. But after placing an electrode cap

on participants heads, the researchers learned how people subconsciously react to words and symbols.

They found that college kids could instantly tell the difference but surprisingly

elementary school students still respond to random symbols as words even as late as 5th grade.

So this experiment was designed to test Automatic word processing. So your brain reads these symbols as words,

which it reads not based on its individual parts or letters,

but based on how it looks as a whole. You’ve seen that mean going around, that if all the letters are

mixed up in a word you can still read it. While most of that post is just Internet baloney,

it does have some truth to it. Your brain can read words as a single object

rather than a string of letters put together.

A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that there’s a small area of the brain,

on the left side of the visual cortex, that can “read” words. Basically

this part of the brain sits right next to the part that recognizes faces. So one area of the

visual cortex can quickly identify a face, another can quickly read a word.

But when is the best time to learn to read? Well there’s a crucial window between kindergarten and third grade.

Research published in the journal Psychological Science found that

the amount of white matter growth in the temporoparietal region during that window strongly predicted

how well that kid would learn to read. It didn’t matter so much as to what their home life

was like or their genetic predisposition was. This area of the brain is super important

for things like phonological processing, speech, and reading. One of the lead researchers,

Fumiko Hoeft, thinks that if the growth in this part of the brain doesn’t happen at the right time,

the kid could have problems with reading.

But the problem with our literacy rate might have more to do with our language than with

our educational system or our brains. English is one of the most irregular languages. Words

more often break rules than conform. So learning to read and write becomes a matter of memorizing

words which can take years and years. Other languages it can only take a year, because

they have a written language that follows rules. So if a person comes across a new word

they haven’t heard before, they can pretty much figure out how to spell it.

In English, "read" and "read" mean two different things but are spelled the exact same way.

COME ON ENGLISH WHY. Apparently I am not the only one who questions this, from

Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet to an entirely new system called Unspell which

looks like squiggly lines to me, there’s been plenty of attempts to reform the written language

over the years. Will it happen anytime soon? Probably not.

Speaking of reading, while it may be one of the best pastimes around, it’s sometimes

considered one of the most dangerous. In Nazi Germany, thousands of books were burned in

an attempt to control the minds of their people. To find out about a touching memorial to all

the lost books, check out this great episode from our sister show Seeker.

So what do you think? Is English due for an overhaul? What was it like for you when you

first learned how to read? Tell us about it down at the comments below. Don't forget to hit those likes and subscribe buttons and keep coming back to DNews. We've got a new episode everyday of the week.