Maryanne Wolf, PAS Academician and University of California, Los Angeles

“Word-work is sublime…because it is generative, it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993

“Technologies are not mere exterior aids, but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.”
Walter Ong, 2002

The development of oral and written language, by the species and by the child, represents a quintessential achievement in human development. These two inextricably connected aspects of language, one determined by nature and one by nurture, are both potentially propelled and potentially threatened by technological innovation. As described years ago by MIT media scholar Turkle (2011), we do not error because we innovate, we error because we do not ask what the innovation disrupts or diminishes in human lives. Within the overarching context of safeguarding children’s development in a digital milieu, this chapter will describe the specific importance of understanding how language, reading, and writing development in childhood are impacted by digital mediums, particularly those reliant on the screen. It is a matter of ultimate concern for our future generations.

To understand how language, particularly written language, can be simultaneously propelled and/or disrupted requires a brief description of reading’s development. Based on research in the cognitive neurosciences, this essay begins with the premise that literacy changes the human brain (see Dehaene, Cohen, Morais & Kolinsky, 2015; Wolf, 2018), which changes the individual’s life trajectory, and ultimately may alter the future of our species. The second, fundamental premise is that the human brain was never born to read (Wolf, 2007). A semi-miraculous design principle in the human brain allows it to create new circuits for new behaviors that were never genetically endowed. More specifically, to accommodate human inventions like literacy and mathematics, the brain creates new, plastic circuits by connecting older cognitive and linguistic structures (like vision, language, and conceptual background knowledge). The intrinsic plasticity of this circuit underlies our ability to learn all the very different writing systems in our world. It also means that the circuit will reflect its environmental influences: e.g., how it is taught and what medium is used to read. As the young brain becomes more literate, the first, basic reading circuit becomes elaborated as it adds ever more cognitively complex processes. For this to occur, each of the reading brain’s circuit parts needs to become virtually automatic so as to require little attention. In this way, young readers gain additional milliseconds of time to allocate attention to the more sophisticated and more time-consuming cognitive, linguistic, and affective processes that comprise expert, “deep reading.”

The key to understanding the potential impact of digital mediums on reading development lies within the allocation of these milliseconds for the deep reading processes. Briefly, these processes include among others: 1) the analogical reasoning ability to couple the reader’s background knowledge with new information; 2) inferential/deductive reasoning ; 3) empathy and perspective-taking that enables “passing over” (Dunne, 2006) into the thoughts, feelings, perspectives of others; 4) critical analysis of this information; and 5) insights from contemplation/reflection, described by Thomas Aquinas as the heart of reading (Wolf, 2018). Each of these processes contributes to proficient or expert reading and writing development, as well as to the young readers’ intellectual, social-emotional, and ethical development.

The elaboration of the developing reading circuit, however, requires time – both in milliseconds (to allocate attention to deep reading processes) and in years to develop the expert reading brain. Here lies the cerebral rub. The same circuitry that underlies deep reading processes can be short-circuited if the reader does not give sufficient time to the formation and/or use of these processes. Extensive research, particularly in eye movement studies, demonstrates that reading on digital screens advantages the quick skimming of information, not the more time-consuming allocation of milliseconds to deep reading processes. As described by UCLA psychologist, Greenfield (2009), “Every medium has its costs and weaknesses… the cost (in the digital medium) seems to be deep processing.”

Put more baldly, the digital medium promotes surface or shallow reading, and disadvantages deep reading processes. In an age where we are bombarded with information, skimming might be considered a defense mechanism in the already formed expert reading brain. In the young reading brain circuit, however, it can be an unintended impediment to the development of human thought processes essential for a society. Processes like analogical reasoning, critical analysis, empathy, and reflection provide the foundation for the future growth and development of our citizenry and indeed for democracy itself. They are developed over time through the reciprocal relationships among oral language, reading, and writing, and they can be disrupted, diminished, and fail to develop if they are not nurtured.

We need look no further than the state of literacy for children in the United States. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), described as the country’s grade card, provides data on the development of reading and math. The most recent NAEP report indicates that only one-third of Grades 4 and 8 students reach the proficiency level, while a majority of children of color never reach basic levels of reading, much less proficiency.

Although multiple causes account for these results, particularly COVID and inappropriate teaching methods, the amount of digital exposure by children and youth is increasingly cited. Current research on the connection between digital exposure and learning underscores the impact of digital devices on child development in different developmental periods. For example, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Takahashi and colleagues (2023) showed a significant relationship between screen time in one-year-old children and later problems in cognitive and psychosocial processes. Similarly, a larger study in Singapore linked greater, early digital exposure in young children to poorer development of executive processes and lower academic performance in eight-year-old children. A still larger meta-analysis of 50 studies with over 171,000 young adults indicated that when reading the same material on screen or in print, subjects were better at comprehending the material in print (Delgado, Salmeron, et al., 2017;2022). Furthermore, those subjects deemed “digital natives” were even better in print, even though they perceived themselves better on the screen. When probed, they thought they read better on the screen because they were faster. Herein lies the false assumption held by many. Speed is neither illumination nor insight. Indeed, it may detract from both, because the most reflective cognitive capacities take time. When skimming is the modus operandi in reading, there is insufficient attention allocated to deep reading processes, leading to insufficient comprehension and diminished building of the deep reading processes important to child development. The skimming that has become our daily norm gives no one time to think.

Correlational studies do not prove that digital devices caused the findings; neither are they neutral. Rather, together with research from other disciplines, they dictate caution and more rigorous study. As philosopher Ong (2002), the student of Marshall McLuhan advised, digital mediums change the interior processing of words and text. As psychologist Steiner-Adair (2012) early cautioned, digital mediums change the social and psychological well-being of our youth. If we are to ensure that our young are not susceptible to misinformation, disinformation, and to messages from insidious perpetrators, we must safeguard the development of their inferential, analogical, empathic, and critically analytical skills.

This is not a call for binary approaches in which various mediums are conceptualized in opposition. We are enriched by many technological innovations. At the same time, we would be foolhardy to have our young bypass or skip the arduous efforts in acquiring reading and writing skills that build intellectual development. Our society’s rapacious desire for efficiency through innovations like ChatGPT and the next “effort-saving” solution should never take the place of all the very efforts that build the circuits for our most cherished cognitive, linguistic, and affective processes. We must preserve these processes as we expand other, new processes that are developed with new tools.

That said, my continuing worries about screen reading are far less important than using everything at our disposal to help our children (and ourselves) sustain the desire to learn, read, and be transported by language whatever the medium. Nurturing the reading life in our children may be our best antidote to the threats that will persist. We can do this by helping our children learn both the love of being immersed in the reading experience and the importance of thinking more deeply when they read. We must teach our children and ourselves to determine the purpose of whatever we are reading. Deep reading processes are rarely needed for email, but they are imperative for important forms of text from contracts and referenda to great literature, all of which reward a quality of attention that goes missing on the screens of our distraction.

Towards these ends, I have proposed what I call the “biliterate brain” as a way to bring about a developmental sequence in learning that allows the parallel development of both deep reading through print and of essential digital skills like coding and programming through digital media (Wolf, 2018). Throughout this biliteracy development it is both essential and beneficial to us all to give our children lifelong associations: between books and love, as they sit under the crook of our arms while we read to them; and between reading ever more demanding texts and their development of their own generative, reading sanctuary, captured for all time by Proust in childhood reveries about reading a book on a summer’s day.

We must all be vigilant about preserving the deep reading processes which propel empathy, inferential thinking, and critical analysis, whatever the medium, whether in ourselves and/or future generations. Deep literacy is the foundation for building the reading life, that elusive entity which can transport us at any age to that place where we can think our best thoughts, feel the joys and suffering of others, and know we are not alone. As Toni Morrison wrote, language “may be the measure of our lives”. The reading sanctuary is where we learn to measure it.

References

Dehaene, S., Cohen, L., Morais, J. & Kolinsky, R. (2015). Illiterate to literate: Behavioral and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition. Nature Reviews, 16, 234-244.

Delgado, P., Vargas, Ackerman, R., & Salmeron, L. (2018). “Don’t throw away your printed books”: A meta-analysis of the effects of reading media on comprehension. Educational Research Review 25, 23-38.

Dunne, J.S. (2006). A vision quest. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Greenfield, P. (2009). Technology and informal education. Science,323, p. 71.

Morrison, T. (1993). Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (2025). Washington D.C.: Department of Education.

Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy: The technologizing of the word: 2^nd Ed. New York: Routledge.

Steiner-Adair, C. (2012). The Big Disconnect. New York: HarperCollins.

Takahashi, I. et al. (2023). Screen time at age 1 and communication and problem-solving developmental delay at 2 and 4 years. JAMA Pediatrics, 177: 1039-1046.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together. New York: Basic Books.

Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the Squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York: Harper Collins.

Wolf, M. (2018) Reader, Come Home: The reading brain in a digital world. New York: HarperCollins.