Transcript Reading: - University of Alberta

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 Shore
Culture In Mind: Cognition, Culture, & The Problem Of Meaning
p. 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 Slobin
A Case Study Of Early Language Awareness
In Sinclair, A., Jarvella, R., & Levelt W. (eds.): The Child’s
Conception Of Language
Pp. 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 nonliterally
• 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.
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.
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 graphemephoneme 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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