WOW RESEARCH: The Test That Can Look Into A Child's (Reading) Future

[Ryan Goble]

This study published in the prestigious online science journal PLoS Biology was covered nicely @ NPR and at my new fav. magazine Pacific Standard. Here is the NPR piece. Also, a bit more detailed summary at Pacific Standard.

Previous studies have found, for example, that struggling readers have a particularly difficult time making out words and individual syllables in noisy environments—a playground, say, or a kindergarten classroom. That suggests that how well kids process speech in noisy places could predict whether they'll struggle with reading well before any difficulties arise.

White-Schwoch, Kraus, and the rest of the team tested that idea by sitting 37 four-year-olds down in separate booths to watch a movie of their choice while also piping in the sounds of six people babbling—"speaking semantically anomalous English sentences," as the team puts it—into earphones placed in the kids' right ears. In the same ear, the team played audio of a single person repeating the syllable "da" over and over. (Kids could hear the movie through their left ears.) All the while, the researchers monitored electrical activity in the kids' brains using an electroencephalogram to see how quickly and consistently their brains responded to the "da" sounds.

Full article HERE.