Reading:

An introduction

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 ShoreCulture In Mind: Cognition, Culture, & The Problem Of

Meaningp. 357

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 doesn’t 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 SlobinA Case Study Of Early Language AwarenessIn Sinclair, A., Jarvella, R., & Levelt W. (eds.): The Child’s Conception

Of LanguagePp. 46

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

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

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

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

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 ox’s head, turned sideways

• The Phoenician alphabet containing 22 consonants 9no vowels) came to Greece between 1100, and 700 BC (less than 200 generations ago!)

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

• 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.

Learning to read

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

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!"

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

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

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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