The deep relations between speech and reading

Mark S. SeidenbergDepartment of Psychology

University of Wisconsin-Madison

November 3, 2011Society for Language DevelopmentBoston

If the science is so good, why is reading achievement so poor?

[preceding talks by Charles Perfetti and Rebecca Treiman]

OECD PISA Reading Results 2009

Wall St. Journal, 8/12/2010

NAEP Reading Results 4th grade

34 25 8

NAEP Reading Results 8th grade

43 29 3

National Assessment of Adult Literacy (2003)

2011

(downloadable from National Academies)(I am one of multiple authors)

Many reasons.

What are the major ones?Ones about which we could do something.

Here are some possibilities.

Why?

1. Blame English

English spelling is strange. Hard to learn.

OECD PISA Reading Results 2009

5. Singapore6. Canada7. New Zealand9. Australia

17. United States

Still, people think learning to read English IS hard.

English is an outlier even compared to other alphabets.

Which have more predictable spelling-sound mappings.

English: Deep Welsh: Shallow

ItalianSpanishGermanFrenchFinnishSerbianTurkishothers

Handbook of Orthography and Literacy, Joshi & Aron (Eds.), Erlbaum 2006

In these studies,“learning to read” = read words (and nonwords) aloud

Is this true?

But reading aloud ≠ reading (comprehension)

I proved this some years ago.

My Bar Mitzvah

Bar Mitzvah Languages

It is also possible to mispronounce words and still know what they mean

Non-oral Deaf individuals who read English;Words one knows but can’t pronounce correctly.

Shallow: can be read without comprehensionHebrew (vowelled)ItalianWelshFinnish many others.

So reading aloud is not a very good index of “reading”

Deeper simpler morphologyShallower more complex morphology

“Grapholinguistic Equilibrium Hypothesis” (Seidenberg, 2011;downloadable from http://lcnl.wisc.edu)

Languages get the writing systems they deserve

Languages and writing systems: There are tradeoffs

Serbo-Croatian:couldn’t be like EnglishEnglish: couldn’t be like Serbo-Croatian

The “outlier” is actually Italian.

2. How reading is taught

NRC report on adult literacy:teaching adults to read is hardavailable methods are not effective

Alternative:do a better job in the first place?

Barriers

1. What teachers are taught about reading

For some children, what happens in classroom doesn’t matter.For most children, it definitely does.

Barriers

2. Failures to identify, help children with reading/language/learning disabilities

No routine pediatric or educational screening for dyslexia“they’ll catch up”

Some significant percentage of those 90 million low-literacy adults are undiagnosed, untreated dyslexics

We could do better.

Change is needed, on the education side especially.

Very hard to achieve.

3. Poverty

Let’s look at the Achievement Gap

The "achievement gap" refers to disparities in academic performance between groups of students.

Minority groupsAfrican AmericanHispanicNative American

Income groups

Reading, math, other areas

Seen ingrades, standardized-test scores, course selection, dropout rates, and college-completion rates.

For today, I will mostly focus on white-black gap.

Why? large populationextensive researchsocietal concerndifferent groups have different circumstances

An important issue A complex issue A sensitive issue

30 minutes?

How to identify causes?

(Does it make sense to even try?)

Maybe it is all poverty

• Poverty is associated with• Higher infant mortality rate• Atypical brain development• Shorter life span• Worse health and health care• Higher crime rates• Lower educational achievement• Higher dropout rates• Poorer schools with less experienced teachers• Poor Reading!!

Economists’ Evidence

• Data: Early Childhood Longitudinal Study http://nces.ed.gov/ecls 20,000 children Interview data, 4 times during K and 1st grade Many kinds of data about child, family

• Black-white differences on reading readiness measures

Their finding: a small number of measures account for gap at the start of kindergarten.

The factors are:

• Socioeconomic status• Number of children’s books in home• Age at kindergarten (months)• Birth weight• Age of mother at time of first birth• WIC (welfare) participant

Fourth grade

Eighth grade

But the gap is pretty consistent across groups.

There is an effect of poverty on scores.

Economists again

Earlier paper: 6 factors account for gap at start of kindergarten.

Later paper: the gap gets larger over first 3 years of schooling.

The 6 factors do not account for this decline.

Nor do any others they could find in the data set.

Something else is going on.

It contributes to increasing deficit in K-3

It affects kids from different SES

It doesn’t show up in the econometric analyses

What is it?

ECLS data set includes information about other languages spoken in home.

But not characteristics of spoken language

Which vary greatly.

For example: vocabulary size (Risley & Hart, and others) lexical quality (Perfetti)

Language

What about dialect?

Languages have dialects.

In the US, main distinction between

“Standard” or “Mainstream” American English

African American Vernacular English/AAE

African American English

• Spoken by most African Americans, regardless of SES

• 1970s: Research by Labov and then many others documenting properties of AAE

• Placed it in a broader linguistic context Dialect variation is not specific to English or to African

Americans.

AAE and SAE overlap but also differ

• Phonology• Morphology• Syntax• Discourse conventions

Among others

• The depth of immersion in AAE varies Washington-Craig: “dialect density”

• proportion of utterances that exhibit AAE features

• Familiarity with standard dialect varies As does degree of code switching

Could dialect differences have an impact on learning to read?

Extent of impact under-recognized

Early empirical studies reported non effects

Socio-cultural controversiesabout intrinsic value, status

Emphasis on validity of dialect overshadowed investigation of impact in the educational context

Attention diverted elsewhere

Our thinking

Need to establish more direct links between dialect and specific aspects of learning to read

Drawing on reading research, theory

And relevant research on language learning, plasticity, age-related changes

Learning spelling-sound relations

• Child learns to relate spellings to words in spoken vocabulary What “phonics” is for

• Strongly related to early reading achievement Difficult for many children Impaired in dyslexia

• Downstream effects on comprehension

Reviews: NRP, Snow “Preventing reading difficulties”

Pronunciations in AAE and SAE

• Many words pronounced the same (at phonemic level)

• Many words pronounced differently

Percentage varies with dialect density. Estimates: 30% and higher

Major Differences in Pronunciation

GOLD, FLOOR, and LOW rhyme in AAE

1. Postvocalic consonant reduction MORE /mo/2. Substitutions for /th/WITH /wif/3. Devoicing final consonantsHIS /hiss/ 4. Consonant cluster reductionWORLD / werl /5. Consonant transpositionASK /aks /

Many others.Craig & Washington, 2004

• SAE learner’s task Learn to map spellings onto existing pronunciations

• AAE learner’s task Learn correspondences between SAE-AAE

pronunciations Learn to map spellings onto SAE pronunciations

Teacher: G-O-L-D, that’s “gold”[child searches spoken language vocabulary for “gold”]

Child: Ohhh, “gole”

The main point

AAE learner’s task is more complex

But children are assessed against same achievement milestones

Not a problem with the dialect

Not a problem with dialect users

A problem with the situation

Other factors aside

Our research

• Behavioral experiments Pronouncing words aloud Children and adults

• Computational models Effects experiential differences Entrenchment effects Ways to overcome them

Behavioral experiments

African American children, adults

Read words aloud

Contrastive: different pronunciationsboundoldtoast

Non-contrastive: same pronunciationbrushairstage

Latencies do not differ in ELP data base.

Children (N =22, M age =11.4 years old)

Adults: N = 32, M age = 35.5 y.o.

Summary

Both children and adults mainly produce SAE pronunciations

Contrastive words longer latencies (also more errors)

For Ss with greater dialect density (more AAE)

Computational Model

Similar to Harm & Seidenberg (1999) dyslexia model

Details

• Corpus: 1700 words from second grade norms

• AAE pronunciations created using 5 most common features of AAE

• About half the words are the same in AAE-SAE, and half differ

Training

• Pre-reading: Model learns phonological forms, to 90% correct

• Then introduce reading task:Given spelling, generate pronunciation

Why are these findings potentially controversial?

Language Arts, journal of the National Council of Teachers of English

What could be done?

A. Nothing

• One group cannot legislate how another group should speak

• But AAE is not the dialect of instruction, business, science etc.

B. Accommodation

• Level the playing field!• Recognize dialect differences• Modify school practices to take it into

account• Provide pre-school activities to mitigate

effects

Do what they do in other countries that have major dialects?

An Indian comparison

Sonali Nag (York)Chamarajanagar, Karnataka

Mainstream language is Kannada

Many tribal dialectsLow statusLow SESMainly oral

“Bridge year” pre-KEmphasis onexposure to Kannada

What Form Could This Take in US?

• Preschool activities To promote knowledge of major features of SAE,

awareness of differences between SAE and AAE To promote ability to code switch

• School activities Continue activities focused on improving code-

switching ability Increase awareness of problem: teachers and

students Provide additional time for initial reading instruction,

which takes into account language the child brings to school.

Would This Activity Eliminate Effects of Poverty?

• No.

Would This Increase the Probability of School Success?

• It could.• Have to do more research!

Would This Approach Be Acceptable?

I don’t know. That is a different kind of question.

Summary

• Dialect differences matter• They affect early learning, later

performance• There are ways that impact could be

mitigated

“AAE itself is not the cause of reading difficulties so much as lack ofknowledge of SAE, given educational and society expectations”

Reading is deeply dependent on spoken language

Writing systems vs. languages they represent

Basic Skills -- decoding

Comprehension

Language background

Of course, literacy also changes spoken languageBut that is a different talk.

Conclusions

Thanks for listening.