The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology

Skilled reading requires years of practice with learning to associate visual symbols with speech sounds. Over the course of the learning process, this association becomes automatic. We hypothesize that automatic activation of the reading circuit in response to visually presented words is a hallmark of successfully learning to read. We used magnetoencephalography to measure cortical responses to printed words while children engaged in an attention-demanding task for which the words were irrelevant. We found strong activation in the language processing regions, the superior temporal gyrus, irrespective of whether children were actively reading the words. This automatic response in this region was indicative of good reading skill: visual stimulus-driven STG responses were only present in fluent readers but not in children with dyslexia, confirming our hypothesis.