Children start to read by rote recognition of words based on visual features or context; for example, the word 'stop' appears in a red octagonal sign. Older children progress to using phonetic cues to decode words. Literate adults process words in clusters, and identify unknown words by analogy to known ones. In this issue (pages 767–773), Guinevere Eden and colleagues report discrete changes in brain activity, measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging, that correlate with these developmental changes in reading strategies. Areas of the brain involved in mapping print to sound were found to mature early in learning, and continued to be involved in reading through adulthood; other areas involved in semantic and phonological processing also increased their activity with reading ability. In contrast, as reading ability progressed, activity decreased in regions of the brain thought to be involved in form recognition, possibly reflecting proficient readers' greater reliance on text as opposed to visual context.