reading, by contrast, is almost certainly not. Indeed, unlike speech communication skills, reading must be explicitly taught. Moreover, while relatively few children will fail to master spoken language communication skills without explicit training, significant numbers of children, for whom spoken language communication skills are adequate, fail to obtain accurate and fluent reading levels even with intensive training efforts on the part of teachers and parents.

Basic research at Haskins Laboratories discovered an unexpected link: The best predictor of reading ability in the early grades had nothing to do with vision; the best predictor was how well the child could decode words into phonemes. If you don’t realize that “bat” has a buh, and ae, and a tuh, the spelling makes no sense. This discovery was not made in the course of studying reading disability. It was just another finding in our basic research program. But it has had far-reaching implications.

Research into the causes of reading disability and the development of evidence based remediation programs has been a long-standing research focus at Haskins Laboratories. Early research conducted here established that reading difficulties are better understood as language based rather than visually based. These studies established the importance of establishing phonological skills early on as a primary foundation for literacy acquisition. This led researchers here and at other institutions to develop and validate phonologically based interventions that have proven effective in remediating difficulties in large numbers of struggling readers.

Recent work at Haskins has explored the brain bases of reading development, reading disability, and effective remediation. Haskins researchers use various brain imaging technologies to examine the neurobiology of reading and language. The acquisition of reading skills requires the integration of visual, language, and associative neural regions. This is a widely distributed brain system, which opens up lots of possible ways in which the system can go wrong. Efficient learners eventually establish patterns that permit the rapid translation of the visual forms of words to already well-instantiated linguistic representations. By tracking development with brain-imaging, we try to identify which approaches to remediation have maximal effects on brain organization and development.

Finally, in recent years Haskins researchers have focused attention on the issue of translation of research to practice. The Early Reading Success Initiative was developed to make evidence based practices more widely available for educators and parents. By integrating biological, psychological, and linguistic approaches to the questions of literacy acquisition Haskins researchers are committed to addressing what has been called a national priority: finding ways to insure that all children master reading and literacy skills.