Norton delivers this year’s Pepper Lecture

Elizabeth Norton has always loved to read. 

As a child she devoured books at a furious rate, reading so much and so fast that her local library instituted the “Elizabeth rule”—permitting her to borrow more than the standard maximum of three books per visit. That way she wouldn’t be in danger of finishing everything she borrowed before even making it home.  

Now that she’s a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, Norton has made it her mission to develop better ways of identifying reading and language disorders in children as early as possible—and thus to help children read more and live happier and healthier lives. 

An associate professor in the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, Norton was the speaker for the department’s 16th annual Pepper Lecture. Her talk, “Turning a New Page in Reading and Language Disorder Research,” detailed the pivotal studies that shaped her career and offered ways of improving her industry’s approach to diagnosing children with dyslexia, developmental language disorder, autism, and other disorders. 

“Learning to read is a child’s first job, but our current methods are not sensitive enough to diagnose issues in early childhood,” Norton said. “We wait for them to reach the age where they should be talking or reading, and then we start to do something. But by then intervention is less effective, and the children have gone for years thinking they have failed at their jobs.” 

As a Dartmouth undergraduate, Norton developed her own major, studying language and brain development. Influenced by a paper on heterogeneity in how children learn to spell, she did an MRI brain study for her honors thesis to examine how students’ brains reacted to predictably versus unpredictably spelled words.  

After graduation she taught high school biology and chemistry for children with dyslexia but soon realized that her students were struggling with reading as much as with the subject matter. “I could not get out of that classroom fast enough,” admitted Norton. “I wanted to help those students, and I realized that the best way to do it was to not let anyone get to that point.” To try to discover how, she returned to school and earned a PhD in child study and human development at Tufts University. 

Norton identified three ways clinicians can change this story. “First, we should characterize the heterogeneity of children rather than assuming similarities; not everyone is the same, and not everyone with one diagnosis can be treated the same way. Next, clinicians should assess not just a child’s language and reading but also the child’s caregiving environment, mental health, attitude, and brain. And finally, we need to start the detection and diagnosis process earlier in children’s lives.” 

As principal investigator of Northwestern’s Language, Education, and Reading Neuroscience (LEARN) Lab, Norton is currently overseeing a number of studies to confirm her approach. In 2022 she and her colleagues published an open-access meta-analysis examining how tests of rapid automized naming (RAN)—the ability to efficiently name familiar items like colors, letters, or numbers—predicted children’s future reading capabilities. After analyzing RAN tests from over 10,000 children of preschool and kindergarten age, Norton’s team confirmed that the test results showed a significant correlation with children’s future reading abilities. The lab has since partnered with a Wilmette school district to redesign screening and monitoring sequences for reading and is working with the Illinois Early Reading Coalition to get every Illinois child properly screened.  

Norton ended her lecture by previewing her latest research project as associate director for neurodevelopmental innovation and impact and codirector of the neurodevelopmental resource core within Northwestern’s Institute for Innovations in Developmental Sciences (DevSci). Supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the HEALthy Brain and Child Development study “will be one of the largest-ever longitudinal studies of brain and behavior,” said Norton. “We will be using our lab’s information, along with findings from 7,500-plus pregnant individuals and their families in 25 states over 10 years, to measure children’s brain development as early as the second trimester.” 

Scheduled to continue until 2037, the study is examining substance exposure and other environmental, social, and biological factors during pregnancy and after birth to determine their long-term effects on infant and child development. Norton will codirect the Illinois site with DevSci director Lauren Wakschlag, a developmental and clinical psychologist in Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Ten years from now, we hope to know so much more about how brain development unfolds,” she said. And thanks to these and other research results, more and more children will be able to enjoy reading like young Elizabeth. 

To participate in the HEALthy Brain and Child Development study, see https://hbcdstudy.org.