Experts have long known that reading skills develop before the first day of kindergarten, but new research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education says they may start developing as early as infancy.
The study, out of the lab of Nadine Gaab, associate professor of education, found that trajectories between kids with and without reading disabilities start diverging around 18 months of age — not at age 5 or 6 as previously thought. The finding could have serious implications for policy, said Gaab, because it underscores the need for early identification of struggling readers, early intervention, and improved early literacy curricula in preschools.
“Our findings suggest that some of these kids walk into their first day of kindergarten with their little backpacks and a less-optimal brain for learning to read, and that these differences in brain development start showing up in toddlerhood,” said Gaab. “We’re currently waiting until second or third grade to find kids who are struggling readers. We should find these kids and intervene way earlier because we know the younger a brain is, the more plastic it is for language input.”
Gaab and co-authors Ted Turesky, Elizabeth Escalante, and Megan Loh worked with a sample of 130 study participants, the youngest being 3 months old. Eighty were from the Boston area, and 50 were from a sample in Canada. For the past decade, the researchers tracked participants’ growing brains from infancy to childhood, and their relationship to literacy development, by using MRI scans. The sample group was supplemented with scans and behavioral measures from the Calgary Preschool MRI Dataset.
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