Dr. Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development and the director of Tufts' Center for Reading and Language Research, will speak about her research on literacy and the brain at the Dean's Faculty Forum tonight in the Coolidge Room at 5:00 p.m.
She will also be named the John DiBiaggio Chair in Citizenship and Public Service, which is named in honor of University President Lawrence Bacow's predecessor.
Her speech, entitled "When the Brain Reads - 'Endless Thoughts Most Wonderful,'" will touch on the development of different writing systems, the progression of literacy skills from a young age through adulthood and the implications of dyslexia.
Associate Professor of Child Development Calvin Gidney will join Wolf and employ his own research as well as that of others to respond to Wolf's findings.
In her speech, Wolf will draw on her seven years of research that culminated in a book that she finished while on sabbatical this year.
Entitled "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain," the book will be published by Harper Collins in the fall.
One important topic tonight will be the distinction between conventional types of print reading - in the form of books or magazines - and more modernistic screen reading, which has eclipsed print reading and become the primary literary source because of the prevalence of television, movie and computer technology.
Wolf thinks that a key difference between the two may be that the immediacy and the volume of information presented to the screen reader can foreclose some of the important milliseconds that the reading brain needs for probing analysis and the creation of novel thoughts.
"We need research to figure out whether or not screen reading is a different kind of critical thinking, whether it's more integrative thinking," she said.
Wolf emphasized that while screen reading is an important form of literacy, it is important not to neglect its counterpart. "We want multiple literacies available for our children," she said.
According to Gidney, Wolf's research cuts across different schools of thought, allowing a new approach to reading-related learning disabilities.
"Dr. Wolf's work is truly groundbreaking," he said in an e-mail. "She has been able to marry linguistic understandings of reading, which rely primarily on phonology, with more recent work [in] the neurosciences - particularly the work that examines how the brain retrieves and processes information."
He said that this work has important implications. "The conceptualization of dyslexia that emerges from this 'marriage' of two disciplines has enhanced how we think of reading disabilities - what causes them, and how to remediate them," he said.
Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg, who created the Dean's Faculty Forum in 2005, said that Wolf's speech should resonate with members of the Tufts community who are personally affected by the topic.
"Many people have children with disabilities, or themselves have disabilities," he said in an e-mail. "It is important to learn from a distinguished scholar about these disabilities and how to remediate them."
