Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

The rhythm in music and the rhymes of language provide contributions beyond phonemes. Think what happens when you read to a three- or four-year-old child: you automatically begin to speak more clearly and more intentionally. In the process, the prosodic or melodic contour of your voice helps to convey the meanings of words to the child. You change the register of your everyday voice and become someone else. Without ever a thought, you who read to young children are effortlessly accelerating the development of many of the most important parts of the reading circuitry: the smallest sounds of words; the somewhat larger morpheme parts such as ed and er; the meanings of words; the ways that words can be used in different ways in a sentence. All of these sources of knowledge teach the child how words function in speech and story.