Maryanne Wolf

Dr. Wolf is the Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, where she is an Associate Professor of Child Development. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and has published hundreds of articles on reading and learning disabilities. She is the author of the RAVE-O Intervention Program, an evidence-based fluency comprehension program for struggling readers.

Dr. Maryanne Wolf discusses some of the behaviors all parents can employ to help their child become a successful reader.

Biography

Dr. Wolf received her doctorate from Harvard University in the Department of Human Development and Psychology in the Graduate School of Education, where she began her work on the neurological underpinnings of reading, language, and dyslexia. Professor Wolf was awarded the Distinguished Professor of the Year Award from the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and also the Teaching Excellence Award from the American Psychological Association.

She was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany where she conducted research on dyslexia in German-speaking children. Her current research in collaboration with Dr. Pat Bowers concerns a new conceptualization of developmental dyslexia, the Double-Deficit Hypothesis. This work was the subject of a recent special issue of the Journal of Learning Disabilities. Along with colleagues Dr. Robin Morris and Dr. Maureen Lovett, Professor Wolf has been awarded a NICHD Shannon Award for Innovative Research and several multiyear NICHD grants to investigate new approaches to reading intervention.

She received the Norman Geschwind Lecture Award from the International Dyslexia Association for neuroscience research in dyslexia. She edited the book, Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain and is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

Learn more at Dr. Wolf’s website.

Books by this author

“Human beings were never born to read,” writes Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf. Reading is a human invention that reflects how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new. In this provocative book, Wolf chronicles the remarkable journey of the reading brain not only over the past five thousand years, since writing began, but also over the course of a single child’s life, showing in the process why children with dyslexia have reading difficulties and singular gifts.

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Maryanne Wolf

Age Level:

Adult

A decade ago, Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium. Drawing on this research, this book looks at concerns around attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology ― as well as hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it changes to adapt to digital mediums.