DECEMBER 2023
Welcome to Our Second Neuroscience in the Nursery Newsletter!
In this issue, we are describing how the young brain’s auditory experience in the first year forms the foundation for learning to read a few years down the road. We also provide a few suggestions for those who want to dive in deeper as well as a tip on one of our fave books for the child whose reading journey is just beginning.
Today’s Topic: From Phonemes to Phonics!
Why Phonics is (and should be) back
Phonics – learning to read by matching letters to sounds and using that knowledge to “sound” out a written word – is having its day (again!). A while back, we posted on a New York Times report describing the resurgence of phonics, with school system after school system realizing (in the face of decades of declining literacy scores) that teaching a child how to sound out words is the best path to reading proficiency. That’s a development that should hearten parents, particularly those with children who have yet to embark on learning to read.
How the infant brain sets itself up to learn phonics
At the core of the phonics curriculum is teaching children to connect letters with sounds – not just any sounds but the ones that make up the language they are learning to read, its phonemes such as /b/ (“ba”) or /p/ (“pa”) in English. So, children need to be able to identify, that is, “hear” those phonemes if phonics is going to work for them. After all, you can’t match the letter b to the /b/ sound if you don’t recognize that sound, right?
But identifying the sound of the letter b, particularly in the midst of a whole lot of other language sounds coming into the brain, actually requires some really fast processing because the differences between individual phonemes are tiny, milliseconds-long variations in sound. That means children learning to read must be able to process phonemes very quickly and very accurately, and most can.
In fact, children develop the ability to do this over the first year of life when the infant brain focuses on sound variations that occur in its environment, identifies the ones that occur most often (which will be the phonemes of their native language), and builds connections among the neurons that respond to those phonemes (collectively, the “acoustic map”). All those connections help the brain efficiently and accurately “decode” incoming language streams – recognizing individual phoneme sounds, identifying phoneme patterns that make words, and attaching meaning to those words.
Indeed, this routine of focusing on sound variation, identifying native language phonemes, and building neuronal connections to process them is the foundation for language acquisition, comprehension, and communication. If all goes as it should, by the time children are ready to learn to read, they are already highly proficient processors of phonemes, so taking the new step of matching them to letters should not be much of a challenge.
What could go wrong?
Developing accurate acoustic maps that give children the ability to process phonemes quickly enough to make phonics a cinch doesn’t always happen the way it should. One significant influence is genetic, i.e., a family history of language learning disorders like delayed speech or dyslexia increases the difficulty of setting up acoustic maps, as children with that history are often less adept at perceiving these very fast sound changes.
Another significant and rarely communicated risk is exposure to sound environments that mask or don’t provide the variation the young brain is primed to attend to – like white noise (which has no variation but is extremely popular with parents trying to get their babies to sleep) or very loud and bustling NICUs – could create problems a few years later when the child is starting to read.
Those types of suboptimal auditory environments (particularly when combined with familial risk factors or prematurity) can interfere with the brain’s critical activity of identifying and processing “salient” sound variations (in the 10s of milliseconds) and result in subpar acoustic maps and, consequently, poorer ability to distinguish phonemes. This can lead to greater difficulty in learning phonics since mapping the letter B to the “ba” sound becomes significantly more challenging if distinguishing the “ba” sound from the “pa” sound is troublesome all by itself.
The parenting takeaway
Maintaining infant exposure to auditory environments with plenty of sound variation – even during sleep – will pay off years down the road when the child is learning to read. This is particularly true for children at risk of having language learning disorders, including kids with a family history of such problems or preemies.
The good news is that creating a healthy acoustic environment is not too difficult. As always, watch the noise levels 24/7 and include plenty of interactive conversation when the child is awake.
At night, the sounds of day-to-day living are just fine, but if you use a sound machine to mask disruptive noise, use tracks with varying sounds (nature, music, womb, meditation tracks will all work), or our RAPTbaby Smarter Sleep – the acoustic cues integrated into each of its music, nature, and womb tracks are specifically designed to help the young brain identify the sounds of language including those heard during awake times but being processed by the brain during sleep.
A Source for More: #1
If you didn’t catch this interview with NYT reporter Dana Goldstein on the fall and rise of phonics (and why it should be the way we teach reading in this country), here’s your chance to read a transcript of that conversation on The Fight Over Phonics from The Daily podcast!
A Source for More: #2
From RAPT Ventures Chief Scientist Dr. April Benasich and colleagues, this article demonstrates that an infant’s ability to efficiently process non-speech stimuli is predictive of their later ability to process speech. The introduction section also provides a nice (but technical) overview of how, in the first year, the brain sets itself up to learn its native language – with lots of citations for those who want to delve further into this incredible phase of brain development.
RAPTbaby Recommendation: The Bob Books
No affiliation with RAPtbaby, but we love them anyway! The Bob Books collection is one of our favorite book series for kids just starting their phonics/reading journey. While the books follow good phonics practices in teaching kids how to sound out words, the genius in the series is the combination of easy, repetitive letters and vocabulary into simple sentences (including the crowd-pleasing “Mat sat. Sam sat. Mat sat on Sam!”) that lets kids feel the power of reading super quickly.