HUMANS BORN WITH BRAINS ‘PREWIRED’ TO SEE WORDS, STUDY DISCOVERS

Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study conducted by the Ohio State University (OSU), ScienceDaily reported.

OSU researchers said that when they analyzed the brain scans of newborns, they found that this part of the brain, called the "visual word form area" (VWFA), is connected to the language network of the brain. "That makes it fertile ground to develop a sensitivity to visual words even before any exposure to language," said Zeynep Saygin, senior author of the study and OSU assistant professor of psychology. The finding hews well with the finding of eminent linguistics scholar Noam Chomsky that humans are wired to language and that the brain perceives universal linguistic rules.

The VWFA is specialized for reading only in literate individuals. Some researchers had hypothesized that the pre-reading VWFA starts out being no different than other parts of the visual cortex that are sensitive to seeing faces, scenes or other objects, and only becomes selective to words and letters as children learn to read or at least as they learn language. "We found that isn't true. Even at birth, the VWFA is more connected functionally to the language network of the brain than it is to other areas," Saygin said. "It is an incredibly exciting finding."

Saygin, who is a core faculty member of Ohio State's Chronic Brain Injury Program, conducted the study with graduate students Jin Li and Heather Hansen and assistant professor David Osher, all in psychology at Ohio State. Their results were published on October 23, 2020 in the journal Scientific Reports.