The science of literacy: From the laboratory to the classroom

Concerns about public education, specifically in the area of teaching literacy, are growing. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that up to 60% of local children may fail their third-grade reading proficiency test. Millions of American students who are not learning disabled but enter school with weak English skills are not learning to read and are ending up in special education classes with lowered expectations and dim prospects. It is not surprising that language learning disabilities are emerging as one of the greatest social issues of our times. A recent briefing on learning disabilities for the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus* included the following statistics: It costs public schools twice as much to provide special education services to a child. Despite these extra services, twice as many students with learning disabilities drop out of high school. This leads to lower employment rates and higher adjudication rates (85% of juvenile delinquents are learning disabled as are 60% of prison inmates). It is noteworthy that 75–80% of students classified as learning disabled have their basic deficits in oral and written language (1).

Finding out “why Johnny can't read,” in addition to being of increasing social concern, has become a focus of scientific research. Although initially the domain of educational research, more recently a growing interest in the neurobiological basis of higher cortical functions, especially language and reading (and the sensory, perceptual, and cognitive systems that subserve these functions), has captured the attention of neuroscientists.

The majority of scientific studies of reading have focused on developmental reading deficits of unknown origin (dyslexia). Early research studies focused mostly on the visual (orthographic) components of reading. However, in this issue of PNAS Talcott et al. (2) point out that learning to read a language depends on acquiring an understanding of both its spoken properties …