A mum naturally helps her baby learn to speak by speaking to the baby constantly since the baby was born. The fact is that, by speaking to the baby, a mum effectively helps her baby developing brain’s auditory pathway. So why, argued by Dr. Glenn Doman, a mum does not also give her baby a chance to learn to read spontaneously as the baby learns to speak spontaneously.
The evidence shows that reading aloud to baby is the best way to get the baby used to reading. It helps to stimulate baby’s senses, and creates a life-long influence over baby’s attitude toward reading. There is also dramatic proof that the first couple of years are the crucial years in a child’s reading life.
If a baby is exposed to reading, with a large written word, new connections among certain neurons in his brain are triggered: some neurons in visual cortex to recognize the word, others in auditory cortex to hear the pronunciation, and still others in the associative regions of the cortex to relate the word with the child experiences. According to Donald Hebb, the correlated activity of two neurons causes a synapse to be strengthened. When this word is showed to the baby several times, it selects and strengthens the connections among these various circuits in his cortex, which forms baby’s first memory of this word. Every time the baby is exposed to a new related compound word, his memory reactivates these same neural circuits, and the new associate connections corresponding to the new word are built.
Therefore, in comparison to most of children who acquire mother language randomly through immersion in the environment that a particular language is spoken, mums who teach their babies to read systematically, enable their babies to learn a language with great speed and efficiency, because the language is no longer left in random, and also the learning is reinforced simultaneously through both visual and the auditory pathways. Teaching baby to read can literately reinforce baby’s intricate biological patterns for language acquisition.