Your brain is what allows you to do everything, from math to designing buildings to making art.

"Your brain is what allows you to do everything, from math to designing buildings to making art," said Laszlo, associate professor of psychology at Binghamton University. "If we look at what the brain is doing during reading, it is a really good predictor of how reading will develop."
The children read a list of words silently to themselves. Every so often they would come across their own name to make sure they were understanding the text and paying attention. Children that had better report cards tended to show different patterns of activity during both phonological (sound) and semantic (meaning) processing.
"Phonological processing is the ability to sound things out and semantic processing is knowing what words mean," said Laszlo. "Like being able to link the word fish with a slimy creature that swims underwater."
Other factors were included when measuring the reading success of students, such as their teachers, their parents' encouragement, their age and the amount that they read at home.
"The thing that is really valuable about this is that once kids starting having trouble with reading, they start needing extra help, which can be hard and stigmatizing for the child and often not effective," said Laszlo. "By using long-range predictions about success, we can give them the extra help they need before they fall behind."
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The paper, "Time will tell: A longitudinal investigation of brain-behavior relationships during reading development," was published in Psychophysiology.
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