Neuroscience applied to learning alphabetic principles: New proposals

Abstract

This study reviews recent data on functional illiteracy and advances on neuroscience about the reading process. Alarming figures on functional illiteracy will be presented with examples of UK and brazil. Empirical evidences brought by neuroscience prove the neuropsychological basis constructs, namely invariance already claimed by modern linguistics. however, emphasis will be given to the psychological reality of letters' feature invariance, demonstrated by various experiments which had been recently run by neuroscientists. Two types of invariance are shown, the spatial and the font invariance, exemplified by a description of invariant features of the Roman alphabet. We then cite the major difficulties faced at by beginning readers, namely, how to dismember the chain speech into words (separated in the written space by blanks) and the syllable into its units, in order to link them to their correspondent graphemes (composed by one or more letters). In addition, one of the major difficulties is how to teach neurons to dissymmetrize the letter features. Neuroscience conclusions from experiments about the reading process demonstrate that neurons of the occipito-temporal ventral region of the left hemisphere must be recycled in order to learn how to recognize the written word. Altogether with the results obtained on a well succeeded experience run by the program Early Intervention Initiative (EH) and by an experiment run in a Florianopolis school, in 2012, they give support to the strategies to prevent functional illiteracy.