- Email: [email protected]
Why Reading? Because it's there
DEVELOPMENTAL
REVIEW
4, 62-71 (1984)
Why Reading?
Because
It’s There
S.FARNHAM-DIGGORY University
of Delaware
Three papers (V. A. Mann, Reading skill and language skill. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 1-15; G. Wolford & C. A. Fowler, Differential use of partial information by good and poor readers. Developmental Review, 1984,4, 16-35; E J. Morrison, Reading disability: A problem in rule learning and word decoding. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 36-47) are critiqued from the standpoint of their adequacy in advancing our understanding of a problem as complex as reading disability. Experimenters should be explicit about their guiding theoretical assumptions, and should think through the relations, if any, between their laboratory tasks and the actual processes of reading. The reading protocol of a dyslexic child is provided, and is interpreted within the frameworks of the Mann, Wolford and Fowler, and Morrison viewpoints.
A question currently on many minds is Why reading? (Mann, 1984; Morrison, 1984; Wolford & Fowler, 1984). Why do some children get poor marks on reading when they do not get poor marks on other school tasks nor on intelligence tests? The above authors have somewhat reluctantly concluded that the cognitive disabilities of interest to them are probably not limited to reading. My own view is that their collective conclusion is incorrect, and arises from a faulty logical position. But first, a brief overview of the issues. Mann and her colleagues believe that reading disability arises from defective phonetic representation. Poor readers, for example, have difficulty in (a) efficiently utilizing information in a stream of speech sounds; (b) discriminating the syllabic structure of words; (c) distinguishing word sounds from a noisy background; (d) remembering printed or spoken letters and words; and (e) noticing rhymes. All this as compared to average and good readers, who may be only a year or so ahead in reading ability. Wolford and his colleagues have emphasized deficiencies in the utilization of partial information. Good readers use partial visual and acoustic cues to aid cognition, thereby getting themselves into or out of trouble, depending upon task demands. On the one hand, good readers are more likely to be misled by foils that resemble targets, whether dealing with acoustic or visual stimuli. On the other guess right when only partial information Send requests for reprints ware, Newark, DE 19711.
to Sylvia Farnham-Diggory, 62
0273-2297184 $3.00 Copyriaht All rights
hand,
0 1984 by Academic Press, Inc. of reproduction in any form reserved.
they
are more
likely
to
is available. (According to Frith Willard Hall, University
of Dela-
WHY
READING?
BECAUSE
IT’S
THERE
63
(1980) some subset of these good readers will be poor spellers, due to their habits of inattention to orthographic information.) Poor readers, Wolford believes, fail to deal adequately with partial information, a response deficit that may extend to a broad class of stimulus materials, and be associated with low IQ. Essentially, Wolford views poor readers as insufficiently analytical. Morrison and his colleagues believe that reading deficits stem primarily from difficulties in learning complex vules ofcorrespondence, in this case the sight-sound correspondences of written English. This has the further consequence of slowing the development of automatic decoding skills, which in turn hinders comprehension. The three types of deficits-phonetic, strategic, and algorithmic-are not mutually exclusive in a strict sense. Yet the three laboratories have made efforts to rule out one another’s claims. Mann insists that shortterm processing of visual and kinesthetic (block-tapping) information is not impaired in poor readers. Wolford claims that it will be impaired whenever performance depends upon the processing of stimulus fragments. Morrison argues that deticits can be reduced when poor readers are not required to learn complex rules. That, he says, is what they are not doing with their partial information, phonetic or otherwise. The three authors have not run all possible controlled comparisons of their respective viewpoints, and I am certainly not advocating that they do so. I think the problems are of a different logical order. WHATEVER
BECAME OF READING?
Most laboratory research on reading is not on reading. That is, there is no attempt to examine or measure the process of reading itself. Instead, researchers study nonreading tasks that are alleged to represent components of reading. The validity of the allegation is said to be upheld when performance on these nonreading tasks co-varies with performance on reading tests. But logically, what does such co-variation mean? When, during the process of reading, do we deal with streams of random, phonetically confusable consonants? When, during the act of reading English, must we remember incomplete Chinese characters? When, during the act of reading, is it necessary to spot a visual nonsense figure at 2 o’clock? I have selected one example from the Mann, Wolford and Fowler, and Morrison laboratories, respectively, and each researcher would quickly remind me that they have also used materials that more closely simulate actual reading. That is true enough, and raises yet another vexing problem. One of the best documented findings in over a hundred years of psychological and educational researches is that poor readers don’t read very
64
S. FARNHAM-DIGGORY
well. If you ask them to read words, they are likely to display nonautomaticities (Manis, Note 1). If you test their ability to distinguish between syllables of high and low frequencies, they will make errors (Liberman, Mann, Shankweiler, & Werfelman, in press). If you ask them to search through orthographically regular lists, they will fail to utilize such simple rules as “the letter y is usually found at the ends of words” (Mason, 1975). Any task that taps knowledge or skills that good readers have is likely to reveal deficits in poor readers-by definition. These are simply existence demonstrations. Poor readers can’t do this, nor that, nor that. That’s what it means to be a poor reader. In an effort to sidestep this empty tautology and press on after causal mechanisms, we design nonreading tasks that we hope to embody components of reading. Yet the tasks often systematically eliminate whatever makes reading unique-letters of the alphabet, for example. That is a very strange research strategy, when you come to think of it. We are ending up in the uneasy position of claiming, in the name of factorial elegance, that the only way to understand reading is to study something else. THE NEED FOR EXPLICIT
THEORIES
OF READING
This problem is one that plagues experimental psychology in general. Researchers, rushing to publish, are not taking time to think through their assumptions. We have heard for years in psychology, “Collect data tirst, and let theory take care of itself. Eschew,” it is said, “premature formalism.” All that eschewing has done us little good in reading research. If the real model of reading were ever going to stand up by itself, it would have done so by now. The fallacy here is the assumption that no theories are guiding data collection. In fact, great miasmas of drifting, foggy, implicit theories are guiding data collection. The choice is not between empiricism and formalism. The choice is between good and bad theorizing. We need to get our implicit theories out on the table and clarify them. For example, Mann’s implicit theory of reading appears to be something like this: There are activities that involve the eyes and visual capacities and skills, a sort of visual operations conduit. And then there are activities that involve the ears and the speech system, and its capacities and skills, a sort of auditory operations conduit. And then there is a central processor that can operate with outputs from the conduits and produce reading. Mann has been primarily interested in the outputs of the auditory operations conduit. One of her major assumptions is that any particular unit in the model has a fixed way of working, like a flywheel in a watch. And if that unit
WHY
READING?
BECAUSE
IT’S
THERE
65
is dysfunctional, then reading will be impaired. That type of assumption is a crucial one, and I’ll come back to it. Wolford apparently shares Mann’s implicit theory as far as it goes, but he has added a special concern with the central processor’s capacity to deal with partial information. He therefore attaches an hypothesis-testing or guessing component-a kind of substation booster that goes into operation whenever the quality of information falls below a certain level. There is now a new way something can go wrong with reading-the booster can fail. Morrison makes yet another structural addition-an orthographic rule box that may be a repository for all rules that have to be derived from irregular data. Morrison has also introduced the important notion that a defective component may impair another specific component, rather than impair the reading process generally. Now, these assumptions are fine as far as they go. They comprise fairly standard notions about the architecture of the human information processing system (Morton, 1970). But if such theory is limited to structural components, then it will lead inevitably to just the problems we have here: The need to assume that a bit of structure has a fixed way of working and that defects in it must be responsible for defective output. Of course that can be true in some cases: deafness or blindness, for example. But the class of disorders that we call learning disabilities are important precisely because they are not structurally invariant (FarnhamDiggory, 1978a, 1978b, 1980). Instead, they are task-specific processing disorders. The reading-disabled child is not blind nor deaf, by definition. He is a child whose information processing system does peculiar things when it must deal with a special type of material-lines of print that literate people identify as written English. An adequate guiding theory of this disorder must therefore go beyond structural assumptions, and buckle down to the task of explicating processes. To read, you must address a set of unique (alphabetic) stimuli in a prescribed serial order. Your eyes must move down lines of print from left to right, a fact that makes it mandatory for reading researchers to learn about hemispheric specialization and callosal transfer (e.g., Levy, 1980; Obrzut, Obrzut, Hynd, & Pirozzolo, 1981). You must pick up in your right visual field some of this information-and in fact we know from Rayner’s research (Rayner, 1978) exactly how much of it adults can pick up-while at the the same time attending to focal information. It is during the split seconds of focal attention, according to Just and Carpenter (1980), that semantic processing is taking place. There are several types of feedback, both peripheral and central, that guide continuing action.
66
S. FARNHAM-DIGGORY
The question Why reading? therefore has a straightforward answer: Because reading is a unique task. It is the only task we ever do that requires high speed, serial coordination of alphabetic, orthographic, syntactic, and semantic processing routines (Rumelhart, 1977). THE ROAD AHEAD
In the future, research on the components of reading must come to terms with the question: How do these components function during the act of reading? An example may help clarify the issues. Figure 1 is a graph of the pauses and sounds produced by a lo-yearold dyslexic female of normal intelligence, whom I will call Laura. She was reading the word reverence typed in primer type and displayed on a file card. Reverence is in the reading vocabulary of normal fifth graders, and Laura had been practicing it in her remedial reading class. Laura was given as much time as she needed to read the word. It took her about 51 set to sound it out, as shown in Fig. 1. Laura’s output was recorded on a tape recorder and was then fed into a computer program that detected the onset and offset of speech sounds more accurately than the human ear can. The program began with the first identifiable silence, which was after Laura produced the sounds of “rever.” Her subsequent sounds and pre-emission silences were recorded in centiseconds. As you can see, Laura never pronounced reverence correctly, even though she had been studying the word. She first said “rever,” and then there was a pause of about 400 csec (the first pause the computer recognized). Then Laura said “renay,” there was a pause of 150 csec, and then she said “never.” There are several patterns of note in this figure. First, the duration of a pause predicted the duration of the forthcoming speech sound. That is a well-known phenomenon, the theoretical presumption behind it being that an articulatory motor routine is assembled during the pause (Sternberg, Monsell, Knoll, & Wright, 1978). On the average, the longer the forthcoming articulatory string, the longer the pause. The appearance of this regularity in Laura’s protocol suggests that her articulatory apparatus was functioning normally. A second notable facet of Fig. 1 is the overall decline of the bars, which suggests that Laura had assembled a governing program for pronouncing a particular word and knew when she was approaching the end of it. The decline is reminiscent of what used to be called a goal gradient, wherein a rat speeds up as it approaches the cheese. A final notable aspect of Fig. 1 is its cyclical quality, which suggests
WHY
READING?
BECAUSE
IT’S THERE
. ..a.............,............, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..*....... . . . . . . . . . :.:.I. .*.*.a III . . .
.-ii
.i
I
s ............................................................
67
68
S. FARNHAM-DIGGORY
that Laura’s program included routines for marking those parts of the word she was going to come back to later on. It would appear that the initial chunk Laura worked on was “rever.” She first pronounced it correctly, but then apparently picked up the letter 12at the end of reverence and brought it back into the first chunk-thus producing “never.” Laura pronounced “never” four times in 20 set, and that implies, to me at least, that she was saying something she actually saw. The letter n apparently perseverated in her iconic memory. Perseveration is a well-known concomitant of minimal brain dysfunction. Letter perseverations could account for the fact that some dyslexics display good visual memories under some conditions but not under others (Farnham-Diggory, 1980). It would depend upon what has to be done with the perseverating material, and if other material is tumbling in on top of it. An extremely important point about reading is that letter processing is not a simple function of voluntary attention. An unknown number of letters (depending upon type size, etc.) may be in the visual field. Focal letters must get themselves organized and dispensed with before the next batch of letters comes in -otherwise a type of overprinting may occur. If so, the child isn’t going to say to us, “Hold on there, I just started to see visual hash.” She has no way of knowing that she is seeing something that other people are not. All she knows is that some people make sense out of it but that she usually doesn’t. So for Laura, “never” may have been greeted with relief and hope. The second phase of Laura’s program began with the pause before “in cent”-which apparently was her first try at pronouncing ence, and again suggests perseverations and reversals. She then quickly began to work on r’s and e’s and v’s again. There is no pause indicating that she returned to the beginning of the word. Instead, she may have been working backwards. She may have been reading, in other words, reverencerever. That is a type of processing dysfunction that would be predicted not only from preseverations, but also from right hemispheric intrusions (Geschwind, 1979; Levy, 1980). For the next-to-last cycle, Laura set up erence again and then probably did go back to the beginning of the word, trying to connect r and v sounds to erence. Apparently the r sound-the phoneme-was then peeled off and pronounced so that the output became “er-ev.” The middle syllable (er) was dropped, “ence” was maintained, “ent” was added, and “erev-ence-ent” was the final product. What, then, appears to have gone wrong with the components of reading as investigated by Mann, Morrison, and Wolford and Fowler? First, are there defects in phonetic processing? It would certainly appear that Laura has difficulty holding onto a stable stream of her own
WHY
READING?
BECAUSE
IT’S
THERE
69
speech sounds. Yet she has no such difficulty in normal conversation. Her verbal abilities are excellent. Addressing the task of reading reveyence aloud, Laura kept a working memory program going for 51 set, which does not suggest a capacity deficit. There are no obvious recency vs primacy problems. Laura is quite able to peel off phonemes and pronounce them, probably to her own disadvantage as will be explained shortly. But she does not maintain a stable stream of these phonemes. Instead, she attacks parts of reverence haphazardly, appears to forget what she has previously worked out, and, for her final output drops a middle phoneme entirely. Theoretically, our problem is pinpointing the cause. It is possible that Laura fails to maintain a coherent stream of sounds because she fails to see a coherent stream of letters. It is possible that her working memory is overloaded with sounding-out procedural rules. It is even possible that she does remember the sounds perfectly well but cannot decide which ones are correct. Laura’s use of partial information is similarly complex. She does in fact utilize partial information; that is essentially all she utilizes. In my experience, Laura is typical of intelligent children with reading disabilities. She is strongly analytical and works extremely hard. Imagine having to put that much effort into every word you read. Unsurprisingly, some reading-disabled children avert their eyes and wish the task were over. But when they are dealing with it, they are attentive to partial information. The problem is either that they are attentive (perhaps uncontrollably) to the wrong information, or that they are putting it to the wrong use, or both. Their modes of operation with parital information cannot be understood apart from their reading performance as a whole. Finally, does Laura display knowledge of orthographic rules? The answer is clearly affirmative. The word reverence is quite regular, and every bit of it that Laura deals with reveals her knowledge of English pronunciation rules. Even the anagrams that she constructs (“never,” “cent”) are legal. Laura’s difficulties arise, one suspects, from conflicts and confusions between her natural orthographic skills, and the strategies she has been taught in her remedial class. The phoneme-by-phoneme “sounding-out” rule that caused Laura to replace “rev. . .” which she had pronounced correctly by “er-ev” initiated a string of new errors. Her major orthographic problem may be the metacognitive one of knowing what she knows. Laura’s protocol does not rule out the three types of deficiencies that have been discussed, but it alerts us to the need for more complex research strategies. Psychology has suffered for some time from imprinting on 19th century paradigms borrowed from agricultural research. We are still trying to show that deficiencies in verbal peat moss rather than visual
70
S . FARNHAM-DIGGORY
fertilizer are responsible for withered plants. The modern research objective is not to count drooping plants, but to find out why a plant fails to perform a complex operation like photosynthesis. To achieve the objective we must first construct an appropriately complex model of photosynthesis, and then probe the model through multiple fine-grained procedures. All three of the laboratories represented by the foregoing papers have technological capabilities that permit detailed on-line study of the complex activity called reading. Once these talented researchers fully and creatively exploit that technology, reduce their reliance upon dubious, nonreading analogs, and devise theoretically explicit ways of manipulating the variables of reading. they will doubtless make rapid inroads into a very important set of problems. REFERENCES Farnham-Diggory, S. Learning disabilities: A psychological perspective. Cambridge; Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978. (a) Famham-Diggory, S. How to study reading: Some information processing ways. In E B. Murray & J. J. Pikulski (Eds.), The acquisition ofreading. Baltimore: Univ. Park Press, 1978. (b) Famham-Diggory, S. Learning disabilities: A view from cognitive science. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 1980, 19, 570-578. Frith, I-l. Unexpected spelling problems. In U. Frith (Ed.), Cognitive processes in spelling. London/New York: Academic Press, 1980. Geschwind, N. Specializations of the human brain. ScientiJic American, 1979, 241, 180201. Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. Psychological
Review,
1980, 87, 329-353,
Levy, J. Cerebral asymmetry and the psychology of man. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), The brain and psychology. New York: Academic Press, 1980. Liberman, I. Y., Mann, V. A., Shankweiler, D., & Werfelman, M. Children’s memory for recurring linguistic and non-linguistic material in relation to reading ability. Cortex, in press. Mann, V. A. Reading skill and language skill. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, l-15. Mason, M. Reading ability and letter search time: Effects of orthographic structure defined by single-letter positional frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1975, 104, 146-166. Morrison, F. J. Reading disability: A problem in rule learning and word decoding. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 36-47. Morton, J. A functional model for memory. In D. A. Norman (Ed.), Models of human memory. New York: Academic Press, 1970. Obrzut, J. E., Obrzut, A., Hynd, G. W., & Pirozzolo, E .I. Effect of directed attention on cerebral asymmetries in normal and learning-disabled children. Developmental Psychology, 1981, 17, 118-125. Rayner, K. Eye movements in reading and information processing. Psychological Bulletin, 1978, 628-660. Rumelhart, D. E. Toward an interactive model of reading. In S. Dornic & P. M. A. Rabbit (Eds.), Attention and performance VI. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1977.
WHY READING? BECAUSE IT’S THERE
71
Sternberg, S., Monsell, S., Knoll, R. L., & Wright, C. E. The latency and duration of rapid movement sequences: Comparisons of speech and typewriting. In G. E. Stelmach (Ed.), Information processing in motor control and learning. New York: Academic Press, 1978. Wolford, G., & Fowler, C. A. Differential use of partial information by good and poor readers. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 16-35.
REFERENCE
NOTE
1. Manis, E R. Rule knowledge and acquisition of word identification skills in normal and disabled readers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1981. RECEIVED:April 19, 1982; REVISED:April 14, 1983
REVIEW
4, 62-71 (1984)
Why Reading?
Because
It’s There
S.FARNHAM-DIGGORY University
of Delaware
Three papers (V. A. Mann, Reading skill and language skill. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 1-15; G. Wolford & C. A. Fowler, Differential use of partial information by good and poor readers. Developmental Review, 1984,4, 16-35; E J. Morrison, Reading disability: A problem in rule learning and word decoding. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 36-47) are critiqued from the standpoint of their adequacy in advancing our understanding of a problem as complex as reading disability. Experimenters should be explicit about their guiding theoretical assumptions, and should think through the relations, if any, between their laboratory tasks and the actual processes of reading. The reading protocol of a dyslexic child is provided, and is interpreted within the frameworks of the Mann, Wolford and Fowler, and Morrison viewpoints.
A question currently on many minds is Why reading? (Mann, 1984; Morrison, 1984; Wolford & Fowler, 1984). Why do some children get poor marks on reading when they do not get poor marks on other school tasks nor on intelligence tests? The above authors have somewhat reluctantly concluded that the cognitive disabilities of interest to them are probably not limited to reading. My own view is that their collective conclusion is incorrect, and arises from a faulty logical position. But first, a brief overview of the issues. Mann and her colleagues believe that reading disability arises from defective phonetic representation. Poor readers, for example, have difficulty in (a) efficiently utilizing information in a stream of speech sounds; (b) discriminating the syllabic structure of words; (c) distinguishing word sounds from a noisy background; (d) remembering printed or spoken letters and words; and (e) noticing rhymes. All this as compared to average and good readers, who may be only a year or so ahead in reading ability. Wolford and his colleagues have emphasized deficiencies in the utilization of partial information. Good readers use partial visual and acoustic cues to aid cognition, thereby getting themselves into or out of trouble, depending upon task demands. On the one hand, good readers are more likely to be misled by foils that resemble targets, whether dealing with acoustic or visual stimuli. On the other guess right when only partial information Send requests for reprints ware, Newark, DE 19711.
to Sylvia Farnham-Diggory, 62
0273-2297184 $3.00 Copyriaht All rights
hand,
0 1984 by Academic Press, Inc. of reproduction in any form reserved.
they
are more
likely
to
is available. (According to Frith Willard Hall, University
of Dela-
WHY
READING?
BECAUSE
IT’S
THERE
63
(1980) some subset of these good readers will be poor spellers, due to their habits of inattention to orthographic information.) Poor readers, Wolford believes, fail to deal adequately with partial information, a response deficit that may extend to a broad class of stimulus materials, and be associated with low IQ. Essentially, Wolford views poor readers as insufficiently analytical. Morrison and his colleagues believe that reading deficits stem primarily from difficulties in learning complex vules ofcorrespondence, in this case the sight-sound correspondences of written English. This has the further consequence of slowing the development of automatic decoding skills, which in turn hinders comprehension. The three types of deficits-phonetic, strategic, and algorithmic-are not mutually exclusive in a strict sense. Yet the three laboratories have made efforts to rule out one another’s claims. Mann insists that shortterm processing of visual and kinesthetic (block-tapping) information is not impaired in poor readers. Wolford claims that it will be impaired whenever performance depends upon the processing of stimulus fragments. Morrison argues that deticits can be reduced when poor readers are not required to learn complex rules. That, he says, is what they are not doing with their partial information, phonetic or otherwise. The three authors have not run all possible controlled comparisons of their respective viewpoints, and I am certainly not advocating that they do so. I think the problems are of a different logical order. WHATEVER
BECAME OF READING?
Most laboratory research on reading is not on reading. That is, there is no attempt to examine or measure the process of reading itself. Instead, researchers study nonreading tasks that are alleged to represent components of reading. The validity of the allegation is said to be upheld when performance on these nonreading tasks co-varies with performance on reading tests. But logically, what does such co-variation mean? When, during the process of reading, do we deal with streams of random, phonetically confusable consonants? When, during the act of reading English, must we remember incomplete Chinese characters? When, during the act of reading, is it necessary to spot a visual nonsense figure at 2 o’clock? I have selected one example from the Mann, Wolford and Fowler, and Morrison laboratories, respectively, and each researcher would quickly remind me that they have also used materials that more closely simulate actual reading. That is true enough, and raises yet another vexing problem. One of the best documented findings in over a hundred years of psychological and educational researches is that poor readers don’t read very
64
S. FARNHAM-DIGGORY
well. If you ask them to read words, they are likely to display nonautomaticities (Manis, Note 1). If you test their ability to distinguish between syllables of high and low frequencies, they will make errors (Liberman, Mann, Shankweiler, & Werfelman, in press). If you ask them to search through orthographically regular lists, they will fail to utilize such simple rules as “the letter y is usually found at the ends of words” (Mason, 1975). Any task that taps knowledge or skills that good readers have is likely to reveal deficits in poor readers-by definition. These are simply existence demonstrations. Poor readers can’t do this, nor that, nor that. That’s what it means to be a poor reader. In an effort to sidestep this empty tautology and press on after causal mechanisms, we design nonreading tasks that we hope to embody components of reading. Yet the tasks often systematically eliminate whatever makes reading unique-letters of the alphabet, for example. That is a very strange research strategy, when you come to think of it. We are ending up in the uneasy position of claiming, in the name of factorial elegance, that the only way to understand reading is to study something else. THE NEED FOR EXPLICIT
THEORIES
OF READING
This problem is one that plagues experimental psychology in general. Researchers, rushing to publish, are not taking time to think through their assumptions. We have heard for years in psychology, “Collect data tirst, and let theory take care of itself. Eschew,” it is said, “premature formalism.” All that eschewing has done us little good in reading research. If the real model of reading were ever going to stand up by itself, it would have done so by now. The fallacy here is the assumption that no theories are guiding data collection. In fact, great miasmas of drifting, foggy, implicit theories are guiding data collection. The choice is not between empiricism and formalism. The choice is between good and bad theorizing. We need to get our implicit theories out on the table and clarify them. For example, Mann’s implicit theory of reading appears to be something like this: There are activities that involve the eyes and visual capacities and skills, a sort of visual operations conduit. And then there are activities that involve the ears and the speech system, and its capacities and skills, a sort of auditory operations conduit. And then there is a central processor that can operate with outputs from the conduits and produce reading. Mann has been primarily interested in the outputs of the auditory operations conduit. One of her major assumptions is that any particular unit in the model has a fixed way of working, like a flywheel in a watch. And if that unit
WHY
READING?
BECAUSE
IT’S
THERE
65
is dysfunctional, then reading will be impaired. That type of assumption is a crucial one, and I’ll come back to it. Wolford apparently shares Mann’s implicit theory as far as it goes, but he has added a special concern with the central processor’s capacity to deal with partial information. He therefore attaches an hypothesis-testing or guessing component-a kind of substation booster that goes into operation whenever the quality of information falls below a certain level. There is now a new way something can go wrong with reading-the booster can fail. Morrison makes yet another structural addition-an orthographic rule box that may be a repository for all rules that have to be derived from irregular data. Morrison has also introduced the important notion that a defective component may impair another specific component, rather than impair the reading process generally. Now, these assumptions are fine as far as they go. They comprise fairly standard notions about the architecture of the human information processing system (Morton, 1970). But if such theory is limited to structural components, then it will lead inevitably to just the problems we have here: The need to assume that a bit of structure has a fixed way of working and that defects in it must be responsible for defective output. Of course that can be true in some cases: deafness or blindness, for example. But the class of disorders that we call learning disabilities are important precisely because they are not structurally invariant (FarnhamDiggory, 1978a, 1978b, 1980). Instead, they are task-specific processing disorders. The reading-disabled child is not blind nor deaf, by definition. He is a child whose information processing system does peculiar things when it must deal with a special type of material-lines of print that literate people identify as written English. An adequate guiding theory of this disorder must therefore go beyond structural assumptions, and buckle down to the task of explicating processes. To read, you must address a set of unique (alphabetic) stimuli in a prescribed serial order. Your eyes must move down lines of print from left to right, a fact that makes it mandatory for reading researchers to learn about hemispheric specialization and callosal transfer (e.g., Levy, 1980; Obrzut, Obrzut, Hynd, & Pirozzolo, 1981). You must pick up in your right visual field some of this information-and in fact we know from Rayner’s research (Rayner, 1978) exactly how much of it adults can pick up-while at the the same time attending to focal information. It is during the split seconds of focal attention, according to Just and Carpenter (1980), that semantic processing is taking place. There are several types of feedback, both peripheral and central, that guide continuing action.
66
S. FARNHAM-DIGGORY
The question Why reading? therefore has a straightforward answer: Because reading is a unique task. It is the only task we ever do that requires high speed, serial coordination of alphabetic, orthographic, syntactic, and semantic processing routines (Rumelhart, 1977). THE ROAD AHEAD
In the future, research on the components of reading must come to terms with the question: How do these components function during the act of reading? An example may help clarify the issues. Figure 1 is a graph of the pauses and sounds produced by a lo-yearold dyslexic female of normal intelligence, whom I will call Laura. She was reading the word reverence typed in primer type and displayed on a file card. Reverence is in the reading vocabulary of normal fifth graders, and Laura had been practicing it in her remedial reading class. Laura was given as much time as she needed to read the word. It took her about 51 set to sound it out, as shown in Fig. 1. Laura’s output was recorded on a tape recorder and was then fed into a computer program that detected the onset and offset of speech sounds more accurately than the human ear can. The program began with the first identifiable silence, which was after Laura produced the sounds of “rever.” Her subsequent sounds and pre-emission silences were recorded in centiseconds. As you can see, Laura never pronounced reverence correctly, even though she had been studying the word. She first said “rever,” and then there was a pause of about 400 csec (the first pause the computer recognized). Then Laura said “renay,” there was a pause of 150 csec, and then she said “never.” There are several patterns of note in this figure. First, the duration of a pause predicted the duration of the forthcoming speech sound. That is a well-known phenomenon, the theoretical presumption behind it being that an articulatory motor routine is assembled during the pause (Sternberg, Monsell, Knoll, & Wright, 1978). On the average, the longer the forthcoming articulatory string, the longer the pause. The appearance of this regularity in Laura’s protocol suggests that her articulatory apparatus was functioning normally. A second notable facet of Fig. 1 is the overall decline of the bars, which suggests that Laura had assembled a governing program for pronouncing a particular word and knew when she was approaching the end of it. The decline is reminiscent of what used to be called a goal gradient, wherein a rat speeds up as it approaches the cheese. A final notable aspect of Fig. 1 is its cyclical quality, which suggests
WHY
READING?
BECAUSE
IT’S THERE
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that Laura’s program included routines for marking those parts of the word she was going to come back to later on. It would appear that the initial chunk Laura worked on was “rever.” She first pronounced it correctly, but then apparently picked up the letter 12at the end of reverence and brought it back into the first chunk-thus producing “never.” Laura pronounced “never” four times in 20 set, and that implies, to me at least, that she was saying something she actually saw. The letter n apparently perseverated in her iconic memory. Perseveration is a well-known concomitant of minimal brain dysfunction. Letter perseverations could account for the fact that some dyslexics display good visual memories under some conditions but not under others (Farnham-Diggory, 1980). It would depend upon what has to be done with the perseverating material, and if other material is tumbling in on top of it. An extremely important point about reading is that letter processing is not a simple function of voluntary attention. An unknown number of letters (depending upon type size, etc.) may be in the visual field. Focal letters must get themselves organized and dispensed with before the next batch of letters comes in -otherwise a type of overprinting may occur. If so, the child isn’t going to say to us, “Hold on there, I just started to see visual hash.” She has no way of knowing that she is seeing something that other people are not. All she knows is that some people make sense out of it but that she usually doesn’t. So for Laura, “never” may have been greeted with relief and hope. The second phase of Laura’s program began with the pause before “in cent”-which apparently was her first try at pronouncing ence, and again suggests perseverations and reversals. She then quickly began to work on r’s and e’s and v’s again. There is no pause indicating that she returned to the beginning of the word. Instead, she may have been working backwards. She may have been reading, in other words, reverencerever. That is a type of processing dysfunction that would be predicted not only from preseverations, but also from right hemispheric intrusions (Geschwind, 1979; Levy, 1980). For the next-to-last cycle, Laura set up erence again and then probably did go back to the beginning of the word, trying to connect r and v sounds to erence. Apparently the r sound-the phoneme-was then peeled off and pronounced so that the output became “er-ev.” The middle syllable (er) was dropped, “ence” was maintained, “ent” was added, and “erev-ence-ent” was the final product. What, then, appears to have gone wrong with the components of reading as investigated by Mann, Morrison, and Wolford and Fowler? First, are there defects in phonetic processing? It would certainly appear that Laura has difficulty holding onto a stable stream of her own
WHY
READING?
BECAUSE
IT’S
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speech sounds. Yet she has no such difficulty in normal conversation. Her verbal abilities are excellent. Addressing the task of reading reveyence aloud, Laura kept a working memory program going for 51 set, which does not suggest a capacity deficit. There are no obvious recency vs primacy problems. Laura is quite able to peel off phonemes and pronounce them, probably to her own disadvantage as will be explained shortly. But she does not maintain a stable stream of these phonemes. Instead, she attacks parts of reverence haphazardly, appears to forget what she has previously worked out, and, for her final output drops a middle phoneme entirely. Theoretically, our problem is pinpointing the cause. It is possible that Laura fails to maintain a coherent stream of sounds because she fails to see a coherent stream of letters. It is possible that her working memory is overloaded with sounding-out procedural rules. It is even possible that she does remember the sounds perfectly well but cannot decide which ones are correct. Laura’s use of partial information is similarly complex. She does in fact utilize partial information; that is essentially all she utilizes. In my experience, Laura is typical of intelligent children with reading disabilities. She is strongly analytical and works extremely hard. Imagine having to put that much effort into every word you read. Unsurprisingly, some reading-disabled children avert their eyes and wish the task were over. But when they are dealing with it, they are attentive to partial information. The problem is either that they are attentive (perhaps uncontrollably) to the wrong information, or that they are putting it to the wrong use, or both. Their modes of operation with parital information cannot be understood apart from their reading performance as a whole. Finally, does Laura display knowledge of orthographic rules? The answer is clearly affirmative. The word reverence is quite regular, and every bit of it that Laura deals with reveals her knowledge of English pronunciation rules. Even the anagrams that she constructs (“never,” “cent”) are legal. Laura’s difficulties arise, one suspects, from conflicts and confusions between her natural orthographic skills, and the strategies she has been taught in her remedial class. The phoneme-by-phoneme “sounding-out” rule that caused Laura to replace “rev. . .” which she had pronounced correctly by “er-ev” initiated a string of new errors. Her major orthographic problem may be the metacognitive one of knowing what she knows. Laura’s protocol does not rule out the three types of deficiencies that have been discussed, but it alerts us to the need for more complex research strategies. Psychology has suffered for some time from imprinting on 19th century paradigms borrowed from agricultural research. We are still trying to show that deficiencies in verbal peat moss rather than visual
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fertilizer are responsible for withered plants. The modern research objective is not to count drooping plants, but to find out why a plant fails to perform a complex operation like photosynthesis. To achieve the objective we must first construct an appropriately complex model of photosynthesis, and then probe the model through multiple fine-grained procedures. All three of the laboratories represented by the foregoing papers have technological capabilities that permit detailed on-line study of the complex activity called reading. Once these talented researchers fully and creatively exploit that technology, reduce their reliance upon dubious, nonreading analogs, and devise theoretically explicit ways of manipulating the variables of reading. they will doubtless make rapid inroads into a very important set of problems. REFERENCES Farnham-Diggory, S. Learning disabilities: A psychological perspective. Cambridge; Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978. (a) Famham-Diggory, S. How to study reading: Some information processing ways. In E B. Murray & J. J. Pikulski (Eds.), The acquisition ofreading. Baltimore: Univ. Park Press, 1978. (b) Famham-Diggory, S. Learning disabilities: A view from cognitive science. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 1980, 19, 570-578. Frith, I-l. Unexpected spelling problems. In U. Frith (Ed.), Cognitive processes in spelling. London/New York: Academic Press, 1980. Geschwind, N. Specializations of the human brain. ScientiJic American, 1979, 241, 180201. Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. Psychological
Review,
1980, 87, 329-353,
Levy, J. Cerebral asymmetry and the psychology of man. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), The brain and psychology. New York: Academic Press, 1980. Liberman, I. Y., Mann, V. A., Shankweiler, D., & Werfelman, M. Children’s memory for recurring linguistic and non-linguistic material in relation to reading ability. Cortex, in press. Mann, V. A. Reading skill and language skill. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, l-15. Mason, M. Reading ability and letter search time: Effects of orthographic structure defined by single-letter positional frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1975, 104, 146-166. Morrison, F. J. Reading disability: A problem in rule learning and word decoding. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 36-47. Morton, J. A functional model for memory. In D. A. Norman (Ed.), Models of human memory. New York: Academic Press, 1970. Obrzut, J. E., Obrzut, A., Hynd, G. W., & Pirozzolo, E .I. Effect of directed attention on cerebral asymmetries in normal and learning-disabled children. Developmental Psychology, 1981, 17, 118-125. Rayner, K. Eye movements in reading and information processing. Psychological Bulletin, 1978, 628-660. Rumelhart, D. E. Toward an interactive model of reading. In S. Dornic & P. M. A. Rabbit (Eds.), Attention and performance VI. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1977.
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Sternberg, S., Monsell, S., Knoll, R. L., & Wright, C. E. The latency and duration of rapid movement sequences: Comparisons of speech and typewriting. In G. E. Stelmach (Ed.), Information processing in motor control and learning. New York: Academic Press, 1978. Wolford, G., & Fowler, C. A. Differential use of partial information by good and poor readers. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 16-35.
REFERENCE
NOTE
1. Manis, E R. Rule knowledge and acquisition of word identification skills in normal and disabled readers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1981. RECEIVED:April 19, 1982; REVISED:April 14, 1983