A team of researchers at the University of Alberta has discovered a connection between what happens in your mouth and how your brain handles reading. They hope to use the results for people who have dyslexia and other reading difficulties.
Basically, the team discovered that numbing the mouth can help people read silently faster. This has implications for interventions aimed at people who struggle with reading.
The study participants were all proficient readers and were asked to carry out two different reading tasks while the researchers monitored their brains for activity in the regions that handle reading and speech.
Mitchell Holmes, a PhD candidate involved in the study, explains the methodology of the research: “We know already that when you’re reading a new word, your mouth sends information to the sensory parts of your brain. If it detects incongruencies with how that word should sound or feel, it will send a corrective command to the motor parts of your brain to tell it how to correct it and say it better on your next attempt.”
In the first task, participants were shown a string of letters and asked if they spelled a real word or not. In the second task, the researchers asked if a string of letters sounded like a real word, even if the real word wasn’t spelled correctly. The participants performed the tasks three times under different conditions: with nothing in their mouth, with a lollipop on their tongue, and after a swish of lidocaine, which numbed the mouth. Each time, the researchers looked at accuracy and reaction time to assess reading performance.
What they found was that the lidocaine helped some of the participants read faster, but still with accuracy. It also reduced activity in the brain’s sensory area, while the lollipop increased activity there. The conclusion was that “oral somatosensory input influences reading-related brain activity and inter-regional connectivity,” according to Holmes.
The next step is to perform the same experiment using people who have dyslexia, to see if the relationship the researchers saw with proficient readers holds. Such an experiment would help “better our understanding of the relationship between speech-motor processes and reading ability.”
Source:
Rutherford, Gillian. (February 5, 2026). “Hold your tongue: study shows numbing the mouth may speed up silent reading: Researchers explore a surprising link that could point to new ways to help people with dyslexia and other reading difficulties.” The University of Alberta. Retrieved from https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2026/02/hold-your-tongue.html.
