Toward a Psychology of Reading

Abstract

Given postively accelerating growth of knowledge in information sciences, such as artificial intelligence and linguistics, experimental psychologists have continued to enlarge their laboratories and theoretical domain. Reading-related research and practice is theme that unifies diverse and varied contributions to this volume. The book covers topics as diverse as history of writing, phonological mediation in reading, eye movements in reading, representation of meaning, and classroom practice and reading curricula. Examples of research questions are: How does higher-order knowledge contribute to perception of letter sequences, is speech recoding necessary for deriving meaning from print, and to what extent does processing of information in one fixation control eye movements necessary for next fixation? On heels of laboratory research has been trend to close gap between it and educational practice. Not only are researchers directing more of their energy to ecologically valid problems, educators are looking to research and theory for foundation for practice. This book offers some materials and tools to build bridge between two areas. There is large gap to span, however, and even scaffolding remains to be built. Over third of book belongs to Lila Gleitman and Paul Rozin. Their thesis is unambiguous and is developed in pleasing pedagogical manner. Reading and writing achievement is qualitatively different from speaking and listening. The latter skills are easily learned without encountering formal instruction and practice, whereas too many individuals fail to learn visible processing skills even after years of schooling. The difference is not modality difference per se but occurs because the eye is not biologically adapted to language (p. 3). In authors' opinion, learning to read requires a rather explicit and conscious discovery of structure of one's language. The major implication for teaching reading and writing is that curriculum should mirror critical events in historical development of writing. Ideally, learning to read in Grade 1 should recapitulate evolution of writing. Gleitman and Rozin provide nice coverage of history of writing, based primarily on I. U. Gebb's lovely treatment of this topic in A Study of Writing: The foundations ofgrammatology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). The authors develop thesis that development of orthography followed very systematic evolution. At every stage of development, number of symbols in script was decreased with concomitant increase in abstractness of correspondence between meaning and written symbols. Although development was often circuitious, one can order development of writing systems by semasiography (the writing of concepts or meanings), logography (the writing of words or morphemes), and phonography (the writing of sounds) in such systems as syllabaries and alphabets. The authors follow this history with comprehensive coverage of modern English orthography. They believe that difficulty in learning to read English is not due to poor spelling-to-sound system. According to this view, reading 151