Reading is an important skill, so it’s not surprising it gets a lot of attention from researchers. Reading is an ancient skill — at least in some parts of the world — but not so old that we don’t know when it was invented (as opposed to, for instance, basic arithmetic). And, unlikely language, it appeared recently enough in most of the world that it’s unlikely that evolution has had time to select for reading skill…which would explain the high prevalence of dyslexia.
Some decades ago, there was a considerable amount of debate over whether reading was phonologically based — that is, “sounding out” is crucial (CAT -> /k/ + /{/ + /t/ -> /k{t/) — or visual-recognition based — that is, you simply recognize each words as a whole form (CAT -> /k{t/). People who favored the former theory emphasized phonics-based reading instruction, while the latter theory resulted in “whole language” training.
At least from where I sit, this debate has been largely resolved in favor of phonics. This isn’t to say that skilled readers don’t recognize some high-frequency words as whole, but it does mean that sounding out words it crucial at least in learning to read. One important piece of evidence is that “phonological awareness” — the ability to figure out that CAT has 3 sounds by COLON has 5 or that DOG and BOG rhyme — is just about the best predictor of reading success. That is, preschoolers who are at the bottom of the pack in terms of phonological awareness tend to in the future be at the bottom of the pack in learning to read.
At least, that is the story for writing systems like English that are alphabetic. There has been some question as to the role of phonology in learning to read character-based systems like Chinese. Two years ago, a group including Li Hai Tan of Hong Kong University presented evidence that in fact phonological awareness may not be particularly important in learning to read Chinese.
I have been trying to test one aspect of their theory for some time. Not having collaborators in China or Taiwan, I have to recruit my Chinese-speakers here in Cambridge, which is harder than you might think. The first experiment I ran took nearly six months, most of which was spent trying to recruit participants, and it was ultimately inconclusive. Last spring I piloted a Web-based version of the experiment, thinking that I might have more luck finding Chinese participants through the Internet. However, that experiment failed. I think it was too complicated and participants didn’t understand what to do.
I have spent the last few months thinking the problem through, and now I have a new Web-based study. I am trying it in English first, and if it works well enough, I will write a Chinese version of the experiment. If you are interested, please try it out here.
The Bob Books series published by Scholastic has a really interesting method of teaching kids to read not so much based on one particular reading methodology but rather a combination of phonics, phonemic awareness and really simple sentences including easy sight words. They also have a great blog that explains more about reading theory: http://bobbooks.com/blog
I really enjoyed your article – phonemic awareness is such a key factor in reading and a good indicator of reading success. Students that can hear all the different sounds in a word and hear the differences between them have nearly all the skills necessary for reading well. The phonemes in English are so much more difficult to distinguish and understand than almost any other language – I am interested in reading more about the study you have comparing English to Chinese.
Sound Reading
http://www.SoundReading.com
I really like your comments. I’m a teacher and obviously learning to read is paramount! Excellent blog.
Amy
coglanglab wrote: “And, unlikely language, it appeared recently enough in most of the world that it’s unlikely that evolution has had time to select for reading skill…which would explain the high prevalence of dyslexia.”
I am not sure that I am able to understand what is meant by evolution here. Of course, the evolution of DNA-messages is very slow, but the evolution of signal patterns (the learning process) is perhaps one billion times faster.
The efficiency of evolution depends on the mutation rate, which must be sufficiently high for a random evolution to occur. Because random events produce disorder (or average information mathematically equivalent to disorder), dyslexia may be a by-product of a disorder necessary for evolution to work efficiently.
So, a question may be; is dyslexia a by-product of disordered DNA- or signal messages?
I may also guess that the phonic system is superior to the other system because the number of degrees of freedom to be handled by the evolutionary learning algorithm is not so high. There are 25 letters connected to spoken vowels or consonants in English which is a rather small number.
This may be an advantage from an infomation theoretic point of view.
Gkm