WHY SHOULD WE STUDY READING?
WHY SHOULD WE STUDY READING?
Literacy is a foundational skill
Literacy is a foundational skill
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Reading isn't just a school subject β it's the foundation skill that unlocks every other kind of learning. That's why literacy is a core educational goal, especially in the early years: get reading right and everything else becomes learnable.
Literacy in India is in dire need of change. According to the ASER 2024 report, only 44.8% of Class 5 students in rural India can read a Class 2-level text!Β
There are many barriers to this β access to school, quality of education, teacher training, learning resources, even meals. Many organizations and governments are already working on it.Β
But one additional piece is missing: a neuroscientific understanding of what happens in the brain when children learn to read. Without this, interventions are guided by our intuitions, which might be right or wrong.Β
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED?
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED?
What happens in the brain when we learn to read?
What happens in the brain when we learn to read?
Reading is something the human brain was not designed to do. We evolved to recognize faces and objects β not text. So when a child learns to read, the brain does something remarkable: it repurposes a small patch of visual cortex β originally wired for recognizing objects - and reassigns it to process letters and words. This region is called the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA). It responds only to words in scripts that you can read.Β
But it doesn't stop there. Literate people's brains have widespread differences compared to illiterate people, presumably because of all the additional changes in learning and life that are enabled by literacy.Β
THE KNOWN UNKNOWNS
THE KNOWN UNKNOWNS
What don't we understand about reading?Β
What don't we understand about reading?Β
Just like we need to understand a smartphone's functioning to fix it, we need to understand reading in the brain before we can fix it.Β
When a child learns to read, we do not know the sequence in which learning occurs or the type of learning that takes place. Do children learn letter shapes, letter names, word shapes, word names, and meanings all in that order or in parallel? How does the transition between letter-by-letter reading to whole word reading happen? Is it accompanied by other changes in visual perception, sound perception, attentional abilities, etc?Β
The result of our lack of understanding is that when we encounter children who are struggling to learn to read at the pace we expect them to, we often lack a clear understanding and therefore do not have possible solutions that can help these children progress into becoming readers.Β
There are many factors, including teaching methods, lack of access to print materials, and learning difficulties, among several others. Through this project, our goal is to study and identify, from a neuroscientific perspective, the underlying causes of a child's inability to read or difficulty with reading.
THE PARNERSHIP
THE PARNERSHIP
IISc & EkStep - a research collaboration
IISc & EkStep - a research collaboration
This project is a formal research collaboration between the Vision Lab at IISc Bangalore and the EkStep Foundation. The partnership is driven by a shared conviction on both sides, that improving literacy at scale requires not just better teaching methods or better technology β it also requires a fundamental understanding of how reading works in the brain.Β
By combining rigorous neuroscience with deep experience in education at population scale, this collaboration aims to identify the cognitive factors that determine whether a child learns to read, build tools to measure them, and ultimately design evidence-based interventions that can reach children across India's diverse languages and learning contexts.
Vision Lab @ IISc
Vision Lab IISc has extensive expertise with studying how the brain recognises objects, letters, and words. Our prior work on reading directly shapes the scientific questions of this project. We strongly believe that India's diverse scripts, with their tight correspondence between sounds and shapes, provide a unique natural laboratory to isolate the visual factors in reading.
EkStep Foundation is a non-profit organization that is aimed to solve societal challenges at population scale β spanning across education, healthcare, and financial inclusion. In the literacy domain, their AXL program provides reading and math practice in various languages, and is already deployed in many schools across India. Through years of grassroots work with teachers, state education systems, and communities, EkStep brings relevant expertise with implementation of research insights at scale.
WHAT DO WE KNOW?
What has our lab discovered about reading before?Β
What has our lab discovered about reading before?Β
Children learn letter shapes before letter names
Children learn letter shapes before letter names
Young children who are just entering school can already tell letter shapes apart even without knowing the letter names, This shows that the brain starts building visual knowledge of letters early, providing the foundation for learning to read (Das, Nag, Usha & Arun, 2025).Β
Visual processing predicts reading fluency in children
Visual processing predicts reading fluency in children
Children who are better at spotting small differences between letter pairs (bigrams) tend to become more fluent readers. This relationship remains strong even after accounting for other well-known predictors of reading, showing that bigram visual processing itself is an important predictor of reading success (Agrawal, Nag, Hari & Arun, 2022).Β
Reading increases compositionality
Reading increases compositionality
By comparing how readers of Telugu and Malayalam perform visual search on Telugu and Malayalam letters, we have found that whole-word responses can be better explained by letter responses, both in behavior and in neural representations (Agrawal, Hari & Arun, 2019)
How letters combine to form words
How letters combine to form words
While comparing behavioral and neural responses to jumbled words, we found that whole word responses can be explained using single letters. In other words, our brains represent whole words using a compositional letter based code (Agrawal, Hari & Arun, 2020).Β
RESEARCH PLANΒ
How will we solve for reading?
How will we solve for reading?
1Build a Cognitive Battery
Distill the scientific literature to identify key predictors of reading. Develop automated, child-friendly tests β validated against gold-standard measures. Benchmark eye-tracking and EEG for measuring attention and engagement.
2Map the Stages of Reading
Track the same children longitudinally for one to two years. Use both behavioural and neural measures. Identify which cognitive factors drive reading at each stage β from decoding letters to fluent comprehension .
3Design Interventions
Develop targeted training modules aligned with the core cognitive predictors found in Aims 1 and 2. Test their effectiveness, required practice, and whether gains transfer to broader classroom outcomesΒ
4Extend to Mathematics
Apply the scientific framework developed for reading to the study of mathematics learning. Begin with expert workshops and systematic review. Then identify the cognitive factors that drive math acquisition.
PROJECT OUTCOMES
Why these outcomes matter
Why these outcomes matter
π§ͺ Understanding Why Children Struggle
For the first time, a clear picture of what's happening in a child's brain at each stage of reading β so we can move from guessing to knowing why a child is stuck
π§ Tools That Work in Any Classroom
Assessments that teachers and schools can use across languages and regions β no specialists or expensive equipment needed
π Help That's Targeted, Not One-Size-Fits-All
Interventions designed around the specific cognitive factor a child is struggling with β whether it's visual processing, sound-letter associations, attention, or comprehension
π A Path to Literacy at Scale
Evidence-based training modules ready for deployment across India's diverse schools β scaling to millions of children
Meet the Team
Meet the Team
SP Arun
Professor, CNS
Shreyas Balaji P
Research Assistant, CNS
Akshatha Bhat
Project Scientist, CNS
Suyash Sachdeva
Research Assistant, CNS
Shashwat Mishra
Research Assistant, CNS
Aakash Agarwal
Learning Scientist, EkStep Foundation
Β FAQ
Questions you might be wondering about
Questions you might be wondering about
Don't we already know how to teach reading?
We know a lot about teaching methods β phonics, whole language, balanced literacy. But we know surprisingly little about what happens inside a child's brain as they learn, or why two children with the same teacher end up at very different levels. This project aims to move from guesswork to precision β understanding the mechanism, so we can design targeted help.
How is this different from reading research done elsewhere?
Nearly all reading research has been done in English with Western populations. Indian scripts β alphasyllabic, hugely diverse β present different cognitive challenges. And most reading research treats reading as purely a language problem. We uniquely study the visual side: how the brain's object recognition system adapts to process text. India's diverse scripts give us a natural laboratory that doesn't exist anywhere else.
Will this actually help kids, or is it purely academic?
The project is explicitly designed to move from lab to classroom. Step 3 is entirely focused on building, testing, and refining interventions. Our partnership with EkStep β which already runs AI-powered literacy tools in thousands of schools β gives us a direct pipeline from findings to deployment at scale.
Why study reading at a science institute?
Reading starts in the brain's visual system β recognising letter shapes, building them into words, connecting them to sounds and meanings. Understanding this chain requires neuroscience expertise in visual perception, neural coding, and computational modelling. Our lab's prior work has already revealed insights about reading that would never have emerged from an education-only approach.
Does the brain really change when a child learns to read?
Dramatically. Brain imaging studies have shown that reading creates an entirely new functional region β the Visual Word Form Area. It strengthens connections between visual and language circuits, refines speech-sound processing, and shifts how the hemispheres handle face recognition. These are among the most profound examples of experience-dependent brain plasticity known in humans.
What about children with dyslexia?
Understanding typical reading development is a prerequisite for understanding why some children struggle. The tests we develop will help identify where a child is stuck β visual processing, phonological difficulties, attention, or a combination. The interventions in Step 3 can then be tailored to target the specific weak link.
Further reading on reading!
Further reading on reading!
Popular Science Books
Popular Science Books
Dehaene S (2009). Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. Viking Press.
Review Articles
Review Articles
Dehaene S et al (2015) Illiterate to literate: behavioural and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), pp. 234β44.
Norris D (2013) Models of visual word recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(10), pp. 517β524.
Dehaene S & Cohen L (2007) Cultural recycling of cortical maps. Neuron, 56(2): 209β217
Research Articles
Research Articles
Das, J., Nag, S., Mn, U., & Arun, S. (2025). Early readers know letter shape without knowing letter names. eLife.Β
Agrawal A, Nag S, Hari KVS & Arun SP (2022). Letter processing in upright bigrams predicts reading fluency variations in children. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(9): 2237β2249.
Agrawal A, Hari KVS & Arun SP (2020). A compositional neural code in high-level visual cortex can explain jumbled word reading. eLife, 9: e54846.
Agrawal A, Hari KVS & Arun SP (2019). Reading increases the compositionality of visual word representations. Psychological Science, 30(12): 1707β1723.
Dehaene-Lambertz G, Monzalvo K, Dehaene S (2018). The emergence of the visual word form: Longitudinal evolution of category-specific ventral visual areas during reading acquisition. PLOS Biology, 16(3): e2004103.
Dehaene S et al (2010). How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language. Science, 330(6009): 1359β1364.
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