The Reading Brain from Womb to Classroom: Typical and Atypical Development and Implications for a Preventative Education Model

Learning to read is a process and milestone with far-reaching implications for education, vocation, and health. Most models and empirical studies of reading development, however, focus on school entry and often limit potential influences to children's oral language and print-based skills. In contrast, a smaller corpus of behavioral, genetic, environmental, and neuroimaging research strongly suggests that reading development begins far earlier, in utero. This article first reviews major theoretical frameworks of reading development and synthesizes studies demonstrating that lower-order oral language and cognitive skills necessary for higher-order reading skills (e.g., reading comprehension) begin emerging during the perinatal period. It then characterizes the development of the reading brain, starting with regions involved in proficient reading and proceeding to neuroimaging work suggesting that the perinatal brain may already be equipped with a neural scaffold that supports reading development. Although brain scans are not suitable for identifying individual children at risk, they can inform accurate developmental, multifactorial models of reading that, in turn, can better guide preventative educational practices.