Neuroscience and Literacy Acquisition
How does the brain learn to read? Professors Urs Maurer and Catherine McBride have edited a collection of papers on this topic for the May edition of the International Journal of Behavioral Development. The papers explore reading and neuroscience in Chinese, Japanese, English, Spanish, Finnish, and German. Researchers focused on both ERP and fMRI techniques. This work is helpful in understanding how we learn to read as children, as illiterate adults, and as expert readers learning to read in a new script. As our department continues to grapple with complicated issues of how reading occurs, whether it constitutes the same or a different process in Chinese as compared to English, and how behavioral measures are related to neuroscience measures of performance, we are delighted to present this cross-cultural selection of new research. In addition, this is a great example of merging developmental and neuroscience-related areas of investigation.
The special issue table of contents can be found here: http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jbda/42/3
