How does reading work? How does the brain learn to read? Why can we associate specific sounds to the letters?
In: Biology
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Arbitrarily. In the beginning writing was done by drawing little pictures of words and China + Japan both still have pictographic writing systems but those crazy Phoenicians got the idea to break down words into basic sounds that could then be assigned to a much smaller number of symbols which is why we call that “phonetics”. Different languages have somewhat different most-common sounds so they use somewhat different alphabets but whatever the language, its alphabet tends to be the easiest way to begin teaching children all the basic sounds that can be combined to form words so those connections imprint themselves on (most of) our brains at a very formative age.
Interestingly enough, we don’t actually “read” ..we more or less recognize grouping of letters. That’s why we can use our peripherals to sorts of “read ahead”.
As far as why we can associate specific sounds to letters, I’d love to know that myself.
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