Reading:

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Reading

• An introduction

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Linguistic transparency

• Someone once noted that we don't speak with
  language, but through it it is transparent to
  us, and we don't even notice it. In our
  experience, our words do not represent concepts
  they present them in a wholly transparent way.
  This is what I mean when I noted that native
  speakers do not normally speak in their language,
  but through it.
• Bradd Shore
• Culture In Mind Cognition, Culture, The
  Problem Of Meaning
• p. 357

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Linguistic transparency

• My three-year old daughter doesn't accept
  English words as language, but apparently treats
  them as something like pure word-meaning. She
  asks How you say 'red' in English? She doesnt
  accept red as an answer, but insists on
  something else to be called an English word,
  along with words in other languages. Later in the
  day she asks What is spoon called in English?
• Dan Slobin
• A Case Study Of Early Language Awareness
• In Sinclair, A., Jarvella, R., Levelt W.
  (eds.) The Childs Conception Of Language
• Pp. 46

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Making language visible

• Written words are a way of removing the
  transparency of language, of making language
  visible
• in learning to read, that transparency is
  removed- it is a system of making language
  conscious.
• In the end, transparency is put back- in the end
  readers read transparently, directly into meaning

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A brief history of Western writing

• Reading and writing as we know it is new only a
  few thousand years old
• The earliest writing-like symbols of any kind
  (non-iconic marks with meaning) date to 8500 BC
• These were accounting tokens used in Mesopotamia
• Most were pictures, some stylized
• Each token had to be included with shipments in a
  clay vessel

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A brief history of writing

• These slowly become more stylized, and eventually
  could be imprinted in 2D
• The earliest printed symbols are found 5,000 year
  old cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia,
  also recording transactions, and with no grammar
• cuneiform wedge-shaped, made by pressing a
  stylus in
• It was over 1000 years before there is any
  evidence of (ad hoc) attempts to simplify the
  representation, with evidence of a syllabic
  script emerging in 2800 BC
• This relied on sound-alike signs for example,
  the word for barley (she) could be
  represented in other words by writing the symbol
  for barley
• Multiple systems were in use at this time

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A brief history of writing

• By 1800 BC there were 600 distinct signs in use
• Some morphology appeared in the guise of symbols
  designed to indicate when a word should be taken
  non-literally
• Some grammar began to appear, starting with
  slotting one slot for an item, a second for
  its count, separating properties from their
  expression for the first time

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Phonological representation

• The invention of the phonetic alphabet was a huge
  simplification, especially on memory load
• It evolved over several thousand years, and only
  once in all of human history
• Our A comes from the Greek alpha which came from
  an Old Hebrew syllabary, aleph, which came from a
  North Semitic word meaning oxhead, which itself
  derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph of an oxs
  head, turned sideways
• The Phoenician alphabet containing 22 consonants
  9no vowels) came to Greece between 1100, and 700
  BC (less than 200 generations ago!)

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Reading as an invention

• It is amazing to see how good we are at reading
  considering how artificial it is reading systems
  are an invention, not a natural phenomenon
• Reading, more than other aspects of language, is
  clearly more psychological than biological

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English as a case study

• As ever, we have to be careful of making a
  distinction between studying reading as a
  phenomenon and studying English as a particular
  case of the that phenomenon
• English is fairly unusual in having a large
  number of irregular sound-to-spelling
  transformations
• The reason for this is simply historical English
  has evolved to preserve the etymology or source
  of its words we have effectively traded off
  simplicity against history.
• We pay a price More developmental dyslexia in
  English than Italian

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What is reading? Not one thing!

• A lot of the psychological processes involved in
  reading are ones we've already been exposed to
  phonological access, syntax, semantics, grammar
• Also requires attentional control, associative
  learning, cross-modal transfer (cf. Geschwind),
  pattern-analysis and detection, serial memory
  superb long-term storage access

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Phonology in reading

• Word reading bootstraps on phonology in two ways
  learning readers use the phonological database
  they already have (in virtue of being speakers)
  to help them constrain word access, and
  experienced readers are tapping into that
  organization when they read.
• One of good predictor of reading achievement is a
  pre-literate child's phonological skills their
  ability to consciously extract and recognize
  sounds from the sound stream
• Children who have good phonological skills are
  able to to, for example, recognize words as
  beginning with the same letter (alliteration) or
  recognize rhyming words- and so they can more
  easily learn to parse the sound stream into
  components.

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Phonology in reading

• It has even been possible, by studying children's
  early spelling errors, to get some idea of what
  they are getting from the sound stream
• For example, nasal consonants (m, n, ng) are more
  likely to be omitted than many other phonemes,
  especially in the middle of a word
• In acquisition of phonological-to-orthographic
  skills, children show many errors that are
  related to the kinds of things seen
  experimentally in activation studies the onset
  (first consonant) and rime (final two phonemes)
  are easier to learn than other phonemes in a word

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Phonology in reading

• Here too there is language-specific variability
  so even adults who are good readers in a
  non-graphemic (logographic) language like Chinese
  may have poor phonological skills
• In one study that looked at a lot of different
  factors that might contribute to (English)
  reading skill, the single most predictive factor
  they found was one which functioned as a kind of
  short-hand for exposure to sound (and for the
  value placed on reading) it was the number of
  books owned by a parent.

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Semantics grammar in reading

• We've also seen that word access is influenced by
  semantic factors and grammatical factors
• Learning readers can use semantic and grammatical
  plausibility to limit their guesses as to what a
  word might be
• Again exposure to language and especially to
  written language (read out loud) facilitates the
  use of this source of information.

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Learning to read

• The cooption of the visual system (usually) means
  that there is a very different kind of conscious
  learning that goes on for reading which does not
  occur for speaking
• Children have to made consciously aware of the
  coding system which allows abstract symbols to
  stand for meaningful things.
• A lot of evidence shows that there is a
  measurable relation between the speed at
  recognizing letters and reading skill, both in
  adult reader and as a predictive measure in early
  learners.

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Stages in learning to read

• Learning to read (English) goes through a number
  of stages
• i.) Pre-literate
• ii.) Logographic phase
• iii.) Alphabetic phase
• iv.) Orthographic phase

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i.) Pre-literate stage

• Children in the pre-literate stage
• Are able to recognize and discriminate letters
  and maybe a few common words
• Have some phonological skills
• Understand that letters represent sounds
• Most North American children enter this stage by
  about age 3.
• Nico "Look- there's a zoo here!"

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ii.) Logographic phase

• Can recognize familiar words, but can hardly read
  or spell any unfamiliar words
• This is a pseudo-reading stage, in which the
  skills are more related to complex visual
  processing than to decoding linguistic codes
• Most children are entering this stage prior to
  Grade 1

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iii.) Alphabetic phase

• Children in the alphabetic phase have mastered
  the low level functions of reading
• Feature extraction
• Letter recognition
• Word recognition
• Lexical access
• They are beginning to use systematic
  grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules for
  converting the (by one estimate) 577 letter-sound
  correspondence rules in English

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iv.) Orthographic phase

• The adult stage of reading
• Sufficient encoding has been done that reading
  can be done by analogy
• People can fluently read new words (and nonwords)
  by analogy to known words, can read'
  transparently' directly into meaning
• Dual routes there is strong evidence in aphasia
  studies suggesting that in experienced readers
  there are two routes one for reading whole words
  fast, and another for reading using
  correspondence rules
• We will have more to say about this phase next
  time when we discuss models

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