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Is the brain prewired for letters?

Even before a child learns to read, the future location of his or her letter-processing area can be predicted from its connections to the rest of the brain. Reading acquisition thus piggybacks on a pre-existing brain circuit.

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Figure 1: A simplified picture of reading acquisition.

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Correspondence to Stanislas Dehaene.

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Dehaene, S., Dehaene-Lambertz, G. Is the brain prewired for letters?. Nat Neurosci 19, 1192–1193 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4369

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