Detecting the reading disorder as early as possible may help more children to overcome reading and learning problems. About one in 10 people suffer from dyslexia, the reading disability that does not impair thinking processes or overall intelligence, but hampers the ability to process written language, often making it difficult to rhyme, determine the meaning of a sentence, and recognize words. In the latest study, researchers from Northwestern University identified a biological process that could be responsible for the compromised reading. According to the study authors, there is a relationship between a person’s ability to read and how their brain encodes sounds. The researchers, who reported their findings in the Journal of Neuroscience, recorded the automatic brain wave responses of 100 kids aged six to 13 as they heard speech sounds. The brains of the more adept readers encoded the sounds, or processed the speech into brain waves, in a more consistent way than those who struggled to read. The latter group tended to show more erratic and fluctuating patterns, which understandably meant that their brains were less able to consistently connect sounds with words. That in turn could interfere with their ability to read, since reading in part involves a virtual hearing of printed language. “Understanding the biological mechanisms of reading puts us in a better position to both understand how normal reading works and to ameliorate it where it goes awry,” study author Nina Kraus, a professor of neurobiology, physiology and communication at Northwestern University said in a statement. (MORE: Early Childhood Anesthesia Linked to Problems with Language, Memory) According to the researchers, people learn language skills by making meaningful associations between sounds and information. The most difficult sounds for the brain to encode are consonants, which are shorter and contain more complex sounds compared to vowels, which tend to have longer and simple intonations. More stable brain responses to these sounds can lead to easier interpretation of both aural and written words. “[Some] kids are not making robust sound-to-meaning connections in language because of the way the nervous system
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