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

by Maryanne Wolf

Many years ago, aided by insights by my Swiss friends Thomas and Heidi Bally, I created a naming speed task called the Rapid Alternating Stimulus (RAS) test,5 now used by neuropsychologists and educators to predict and diagnose dyslexia. Basically it asks a person to name a series of fifty well-known items in different categories, specifically letters, numbers, and colors. The person has to switch from one category to the next as fast as possible, which requires both considerable automatized knowledge and a great deal of flexibility. An unexpected finding in the various comparison studies was that bilingual adults were faster on these tasks than were their monolingual peers. Dual-language learners had acquired far more verbal flexibility than single-language learners had.