EDUCATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE FOR READING RESEARCHERS

In this chapter, the authors describe the state of the science regarding neural correlates of acknowledged and potential reading processes and reading development. Specifically, they review the neural correlates of decoding and language comprehension and relate such findings to models of reading, reading instruction, and reading disability. The authors discuss what neuroscience research might mean for researchers and practitioners in education. The neuroscience research on reading and language processes suggests more generally that certain categories of function correlate with unique, if varied, activation of human brains. Attention by reading researchers and teacher educators to how neuroscientists parse the floating signifier of language comprehension may provide an alternative and possibly fuller map of necessary comprehension subprocesses. The authors group these in terms of word meaning processes, syntactic and sentence-level meaning processes (semantics), emotional signification, and higher order cognitive and text feature processes.