Excerpts From: The Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read , Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It
by Mark Seidenberg
1. Why is vocabulary so important to becoming a reader? Children in the K-3 range encounter relatively few of the words they know in the books they read. A first grader can sit in the advanced group if she can read only a few hundred words, enough for The Cat in the Hat, which has 236. The child will need more words to read more advanced texts, but at the outset the factor that limits reading is knowledge of print, not vocabulary.
2. The country is a chronic underachiever. A 2003 study found that about 93 million adults read at basic or below basic levels. At those levels, a person might be able to follow the instructions for mixing a batch of cake mix but not understand a fact sheet about high blood pressure.
3.
At
the upper end, we are turning out fewer highly proficient readers than expected
given our economic resources.
4.
Anxiety
about reading achievement underlies endless debates about how reading should be
taught. Parents know it is essential that their children learn to read well,
but lacking confidence that schools can do the job, they are driven to seek
additional help from tutors or commercial learning centers, if they can afford
it. Our knowledge about reading has
grown enormously, but, as ever, many people cannot read, or can read only
poorly, or are able to read but avoid it.
5.
Are
reading and writing gradually being reduced to tools in the service of
reading-ish activities such as texting, tweeting, and Facebooking? What about overscheduling: the relentless demands of ballet, piano,
violin, drama, tae kwon do, 6 a.m. slots at the hockey rink, soccer practice,
matches, and travel? Middle schoolers
cannot read while running dribbling and passing drills. Perhaps reading is simply less important than
it used to be. Writing was the first
information technology, but now there are others. We have screens, they have pictures, sound,
video. Text carries less of the
communicative load than before. I
greatly prefer to read a recipe, but a video demonstration conveys additional
information, for people who have the patience to sit through it.
6.
The
only certain way to obviate low literacy is prevention: successfully teaching children to read in the
first place. Would more people be better
readers if they had been taught differently?
How much does schooling affect how well children read and, with it,
their engagement in reading?
7.
Reading is unique.
Reading is among the highest expressions of human intelligence. Although spoken language is usually taken as
the capacity that distinguishes people from other species, researchers have debated the degree to which
other species’s communication systems resemble language. No other species has a linguistic capacity
equal to ours, but animal communication systems share some properties with
human language. The late African Grey
parrot Alex clearly had communicative interactions with his longtime trainers
Irene Pepperberg. Was his use of words very much like human speech or an oddly
evocative simulation, the result of thousands of hours of intense
training? Whatever the answer to that
question, we know that no other species has an ability remotely like
reading. Indeed, Homo sapiens didn’t either until the invention of writing about
five thousand years ago. Understanding
this complex skill means understanding something essential about being human.
8.
The
advent of reading occurred relatively recently in human history, well after
humans had evolved capacities to speak, think, perceive, reason, learn, and
act. Reading was a new tool created out
of existing parts.
9. Reading
is taught, beginning with alphabet songs and bedtime stories and continuing
through several years of schooling.
Speech
is fast fading: the signal is gone once it is
produced.
Writing systems were
created as a way to transcend the impermanence of speech. This text is not disappearing as you read it.
10. The primal question about writing
is how it originated. How did writing
come into being, when and how many times?
11. How did humans manage to progress
from drawing pictures of horses to
writing about them?
12. The standard story about the origin
of writing goes like this. Humans have
been created representational images for more than 30,000 years, the approximate
date of the oldest known cave paintings.
The paintings are depictions of things their creators saw, mainly
animals, objects, and body parts. Early
writing is said to have built on this capacity, using simplified depictions of
objects, called pictographs. The use of
pictographs limited communication to what can be rendered in this manner.
13. The writing system mostly began
with pictographs, which gradually became more abstract, greatly expanding what
could be represented and communicated.
14. Moving
from depiction to symbol: Writing systems emerged when pictographs and
other graphical elements were used to symbolize language rather than signify
things. A picture of a bird, for
example, could be used to represent the spoken word for bird. It is then a symbol for a sound pattern. Using a picture for a purpose other than
signifying the pictured entity was not merely counterintuitive, it went
unintuited for eons. Once the trick of
using graphical elements as symbols was discovered, they could be pictographic
or abstract, and they could be used to represent many types of information
(e.g., words, initial sounds of words, concepts, categories of objects,
grammatical elements).
Representing entire
languages: The proto-writing systems only represented
some elements of a language, mainly words for objects and quantities. It took another couple of thousand years to
develop workable writing systems that fully represented language. The major advance was determining how a
relatively small set of symbols could represent a much larger set of words. The general solution, which every successful
writing system employs, is using combinations of symbols that represent clues
about sound and meaning.
Discovering
phonology: Writing systems require treating spoken words
as consisting of parts, which can then be represented by a limited set of
graphical elements. We take it as
obvious that speech consists of units such as words, syllables, and phonemes,
but these units are phonological abstractions that had to be discovered. Writing and the phonological way of thinking
coevolved over a long period.
Establishing
congruence: The properties of writing systems need to
align with properties of the spoken languages they represent. Writing systems only converged on this
crucial feature over a long period of trial and error.
The
questions then are why each of these advances was so important, how they could
have been achieved, and why they took so remarkably long. Reading is indeed an “unnatural act” compared
to speech, as Philip Gough, a distinguished reading researcher, put it, but the
events that were crucial to writing’s development were supremely unnatural,
distributed over many years, regions, cultures, languages, individuals.
15. Using pictographs and abstract
signs to represent words was not just games-changing, it was
life-on-earth-changing because it opened the door to full writing systems. The further problem was to determine how to
represent an entire spoken language rather than a few hundred important
words. With hindsight, we know what is
required. Language is a code that allows
an infinite number of messages to be expressed using a finite set of primitive
elements: the phonemes, syllables, and morphemes that are the building blocks
of words. A writing system based on a
suitable set of primitives can represent any word and thus an entire
language. This guiding principle had to
be discovered, as did how to implement it in a practical way for various types
of spoken languages.
16. The problem that writing systems
solved is how to convey messages of much greater variety and specificity than
afforded by pictures, ideographs, and other visual elements. The general solution was to use an efficient
graphical code to represent spoken language at a level appropriate for a type
of language. The characteristics of
writing systems are determined by the ways they represent spoken languages and
the ways spoken languages, in turn, represent meaning. Writing systems are alike because they
represent phonology and semantics, though the solutions vary in detail. This property has an important implication for
how we read; reading is not just about spelling: it is inherently also about
phonology and semantics because that is what writing systems represent.
17. Reading speed is obviously going to
depend on factors such as readers’ skills and goals and whether they are
reading Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics or TMZ.com. But let’s just do some cold, hard
calculations based on facts about the properties of eyes and texts.
·
About
seven to eight letters are read clearly on each fixation.
·
Fixation
durations average around 200 to 250 milliseconds (four to five per second).
·
Words
in most texts are about five letters long on average.
·
4
fixations per second = 240 fixations per minute
·
240
fixations x 7 letters per fixation = 1,680 letters per minute.
·
1,680
letters/6 (five letters per word plus a space) = 280 words per minute
18. Recognizing that a string of
letters is a specific word requires ruling out that it is any other word. Alphabets are a potential problem because
even a small number of letters can generate a very large number of spelling
patterns. From twenty-six letters,
475,254 words can be formed that are one to four letters long. If five-letter words are allowed, the number
jumps to over 12 million.
19. The Oxford English Dictionary has
entries for about 170,000 words (in the entire history of the language), and
the vocabularies of people reading this book are on the order of 20,000 to
40,000 words (the estimate is imprecise because it depends on how “word” is
defined). The fact that most letter
combinations do not occur makes it easier to recognize the ones that do. The range of possibilities has already been
severely restricted before a word is even read.
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