Similar to a traveler who unknowingly sets out on the wrong route and needs to be redirected, the brain's plasticity can be utilized to guide the development of neural networks to correct language learning problems. That key finding and insights into the brain's auditory processing system by Paula Tallal, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience, has helped to bring positive change to hundreds of thousands of children worldwide who struggle with language.
With her co-researchers, Tallal helped to devise a revolutionary technique and software program - Fast ForWord - to assist children with establishing and strengthening the neural networks for language development. For more than 30 years, Tallal, co-director of the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, has been studying the connections between auditory processing, attention, memory and language learning. What her research has shown is that timing is critically important for learning language and speech. The central problem for many children who struggle with language, including those with dyslexia, is that their brains have difficulty perceiving rapidly successive acoustic changes, such as the difference between "da" and "ba."
Tallal and her co-researchers hypothesized that the brain’s neuroplasticity could be used to rewire neural networks to increase that processing speed – or to "fire and wire" as she describes it. Neuroplasticity refers to the fact that the brain, rather than being molded and set, is able to reorganize itself in response to new situations or changes in the environment. In 1996, she and co-researcher Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus, University of California, San Francisco, founded Scientific Leaning Corporation to bring their research out of the lab to help children who struggle with language. The result was Fast ForWord, a computer-based program that corrects auditory processing problems by pushing the brain to handle auditory information at faster and faster speeds. The software, with an 80 percent success rate, has been used by children in more than 40 countries.
In her research, Tallal found that many children who struggle with language have a listening "window" that is slower than 1/4 second long. Yet to differentiate fast-changing sounds, the brain needs to be able to perceive differences at the millisecond range to learn the smaller sounds inside of words, the phonemes. If auditory information could be slowed down, Tallal theorized, it should become easier for children with processing delays to learn those differences. That instead of mistaking "cat" for "tat," for example, they could learn to hear the discrete changes. And if that information then could be presented at increasingly faster rates, their brains could be remodeled to make learning language easier and permanent. That is just what Fast ForWord and the team's related learning tools accomplish. As shown by fMRI studies, the brains of children who have used the program develop the same firing patterns as children who do not struggle with language.
Her research focused on the neural and genetic bases of language development, and early detection methods for language learning difficulties. In research that followed a set of babies across several years, she and her team found that identifying how fast the brain can organize simple incoming auditory information at very young ages is the best predictor of successful language development. Such findings could open the way for earlier correction methods to spare children the struggles so many experience because of processing delays.
Paula Tallal, now a Rutgers Professor Emerita, is a world-renowned authority and leading researcher in language learning disabilities. A cognitive neuroscientist and board-certified clinical psychologist, she was recruited to Rutgers in 1985 to co-found and co-direct the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience. She also is one of the founders of the Scientific Learning Corporation which develops the reading and language learning programs Fast ForWord, among other products that pioneer computer/Internet based training based on neuroplasticity. She has authored over 200 professional publications and holds several patents. She was selected by the Library of Congress to be the Commentator for the Field of Psychology at its Bicentennial Celebration and earned the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Prize for her work leading to the development of Fast ForWord. She is an active participant in many scientific advisory boards and governmental committees for both developmental language disorders and learning disabilities.
Tallal received her bachelor's degree from New York University and her Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and conducted additional research training at Johns Hopkins University.
- Neural correlates of rapid auditory processing are disrupted in children with developmental dyslexia and ameliorated with training: an fMRI study, Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 2007.
- Dynamic auditory processing, musical experience and language development, Trends in Neurosciences, July 2006.
- What happens when 'dyslexic' subjects do not meet the criteria for dyslexia and sensorimotor tasks are too difficult even for the controls?, Development Science, May 2006.
- Neural correlates of rapid spectrotemporal processing in musicians and nonmusicians, The New York Academy of Science, Dec. 2005.
- Sex and hemispheric differences for rapid auditory processing in normal adults, Laterality, Jan. 4, 1999.
- Improving language and literacy is a matter of time, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Sept. 2004.
- Examination of potential overlap in autism and language loci on chromosomes 2, 7, and 13 in two independent samples ascertained for specific language impairment, Human Heredity, 2004.
- Jersey Roots, Global Reach: The Neuroscientist, Rutgers Magazine, Winter 2008
- National Science Foundation Awards $12 Million Grant to Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, Business Wire, November 2008
- Researchers look to predict developmental difficulties in babies Boston Globe - Dec 26, 2005
- Rutgers Researcher: Brains In Dyslexic Children Can Be 'Rewired' sciencedaily.com - Mar 5, 2003
- Dyslexia: Lost for words Nature.com - Sep 25, 2003
- Dyslexic brains can be retrained.(Learning Disabilities) USA TODAY Oct 1, 2003
- Avoiding the pediatrician's error: how neuroscientists can help... Nature.com - Oct 28, 2002
- Rewiring Your Gray Matter: The brain: You can teach an old brain new tricks. Neuroplasticity promises Newsweek Jan 1, 2000
- Verdict Still Not In on Dyslexia Therapy New York Times - Sep 14, 1999
- TIME REPORTS: UNDERSTANDING PSYCHOLOGY TIME - Jul 5, 1999
- Why video games may actually help your children learn BusinessWeek - Dec 23, 1996
- Glasses for the Ears' Easing Children's Language Woes New York Times, November 14, 1995
- Research discovers secrets of how brain learns to talk Series: Unlocking the mind. Chicago Tribune Date: Apr 13, 1993