Answer to Test Question #3
Question: There are about 200 ways to spell the sounds of the 44 phonemes in English.
Answer: False. Actually, there are more than 1,100 ways to represent the sounds of the 44 English phonemes. This condition, known as deep orthography, is one major reason that English is a difficult language to learn, especially for those whose native language, such as Spanish, has more reliable letter-to-sound correspondences.
As we discussed earlier, the human brain is not born with the insight to make sound-to-letter connections, nor does it develop naturally without the instruction needed to reassign brain regions to perform this task. Children of literate homes may encounter this instruction from their parents before coming to school. Others, however, do not have this opportunity during their preschool years. For them, classroom instruction needs to focus on making the phoneme-phonics connections before reading can be successful. If children cannot hear the -at sound in bat and hat and perceive that the difference lies in the first sound, then they will have difficulty decoding and sounding out words quickly and correctly. When children learn the alphabetic principle, the problems of inconsistent orthography are resolved the same way other learning challenges are—through practice. The brain’s visual areas learn to break down a word into its letters and graphemes. With sufficient, effective practice, children develop a context-sensitive understanding of letter-to-sound correspondence. Eventually, they learn that -ough in the context of c_ _ _ _ is pronounced differently than it is in the context of thr_ _ _ _. Furthermore, having children simply practice letter recognition or phoneme pronunciation without teaching the letter-to-sound correspondence has been shown in studies to be of no value in helping children acquire the alphabetic principle (Castles, Coltheart, Wilson, Valpied, & Wedgwood, 2009).
Letters to Words
Decoding
Phonological awareness helps the beginning reader decipher printed words by linking them to the spoken words that the child already knows. This process is called decoding. It involves realizing that a printed word represents the spoken word through a written sequence of graphemes that stand for phonemes, and then blending the phonemes to pronounce the word. A child must be able to decode with accuracy and fluency in order to read proficiently. Now we are in the third, orthographic, stage. Decoding starts with learning the visual image of the letters of the alphabet and the basic sounds they represent. There has been serious discussion among researchers over whether beginning readers should learn the letters of the alphabet by their names (that is, ay, bee, cee, dee, etc.) or by how they generally sound (that is, ah, beh, cuh, duh, etc.). Some researchers believe that knowing the names of the letters of the alphabet may actually delay the acquisition of reading. Knowing that “p” is pee, “h” is aitch, “o” is oh, “n” is en, and “e” is ee is of little help when trying to read the word “phone.” And when is “f” ever pronounced as ef in a word? Reading requires understanding phonemes, not letter names, they argue. It might be more helpful to learn the common sounds of the alphabet letters rather than their names so as to accelerate the child’s ability to link sounds to letters (Dehaene, 2009). On the other hand, those who support first learning the names of the letters believe that doing so makes it easier to refer to the letter.
Early decoding most likely starts when children match symbols in their environment to concrete objects in contextual situations. For example, many children recognize the Golden Arches and the McDonald’s sign as representing a place they like to eat, yet they might not be able to read the word McDonald’s out of context. Children might also recognize the word corn on a cereal box, but might not recognize it in a story. This situation is called environmental print reading.
Exactly how the human brain developmentally makes the connections between sounds and words needed for successful decoding is still unclear. But research studies, including those using brain scans, have helped neurolinguists gain a better understanding of how written word knowledge develops in the beginning reader. One model was developed by Ehri (1998), who proposed four phases of word recognition during early reading (Figure 2.1). Psychologists continue to use this model today because it still represents what they observe in children as they become skillful in word recognition. The phases are described as follows (Morris, Bloodgood, Lomax, & Perney, 2003):
1. Prealphabetic phase. In this phase, children remember words by connecting visual cues in the word (such as the two ls in bell or the curve at the end of dog) with the word’s meaning and pronunciation. There is no systematic letter-sound connection. Consequently, the child’s ability to commit new words to memory or retain old words is overwhelmed when visually similar words (such as bell, ball, and will, or dog, bug, and dig) are encountered in the text.
2. Partial alphabetic phase. In this phase, the child commits printed words to memory by connecting one or more printed letters with the corresponding sound(s) heard during pronunciation. For instance, a child might remember the word talk by joining the beginning and ending letters (t and k) with their corresponding spoken sounds tuh and kuh. New readers enter this phase when they know some letter-sound correspondences and can separate the beginning or ending sounds from the word. Words now become easier to remember because they can be processed through a more reliable letter-sound system rather than the unreliable visual cues used in the prealphabetic phase. This phase is sometimes called sight-word reading, and the readers develop the ability to recognize certain familiar and high-frequency words. However, because these readers still have a limited memory, the ability to remember new words diminishes. They will confuse letters, misreading take or tack for talk, and usually cannot read text that has words outside their mental lexicon.
3. Full alphabetic phase. As reading progresses, phonemic awareness improves, and the reader moves into this phase. Here, the child remembers how to read a specific word by making accurate connections between the letters seen in the word and the phonemes used in the word’s pronunciation. For example, when reading the word trap, the child recognizes the initial consonant blend, /tr/, then the medial vowel, /u/, and then the final consonant, /p/. This complete phoneme-grapheme connection will facilitate committing this word to long-term memory, thus leading to more accurate reading.
4. Consolidated alphabetic phase. In this phase, the beginning reader begins to notice multiletter sequences that are common to words stored in memory (such as the ending -ake in cake, make, and take, or -ent in bent, cent, and tent). By forming a chunk for each common sequence, word reading becomes faster and more efficient. When encountering a new word containing the chunk (such as dent), the child just processes the beginning consonant and the chunk, instead of processing each letter separately. Chunking is particularly helpful when reading longer, multisyllable words like practice, measurement, and traditional.
As children master each phase, their mental lexicons grow dramatically. Ehri’s model is consistent with current studies (e.g., Wagovich, Pak, & Miller, 2012), all of which describe an increasing degree of phoneme awareness that occurs in stages. Beginning readers focus on the initial sound of a word (bug = /b/ /-/ /-/). Then they progress to processing the beginning and ending sounds (bug = /b/ /-/ /g/), and finally to each sound in the word (bug = /b/ /u/ /g/).
Figure 2.1 As word recognition develops over time from the prealphabetic phase to the consolidated alphabetic phase, the reader’s vocabulary (the mental lexicon) grows dramatically (Ehri, 1998).
Morphemes
What Are Morphemes and Morphology? As reading practice continues, the neural systems are no longer decoding words letter by letter, but are becoming better at recognizing morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest word elements that can change a word’s meaning, such as the -ing that changes signal to signaling. They can stand on their own as a complete word (free morphemes) or exist as prefixes and suffixes (bound morphemes) that must be added to a root word. When readers understand morphemes, they can separate unfamiliar words into comprehensible parts. If the rea
der understands what hate means and also what -ful means, then the reader is likely to comprehend the meaning of hateful. This component of grammar that builds words out of pieces (morphemes) is called morphology.
There are two types of bound morphemes:
1. Inflectional morphemes. These are suffixes that provide information such as case (Tommy’s dog), number (dog/dogs), tense (he called), and person (she calls).
2. Derivational morphemes. These are affixes (prefixes and suffixes) that create new words by changing the meaning of the root words. Some derivational morphemes change the root word’s part of speech (attend is a verb, but add -ance and attendance becomes a noun). Others, like un- and re-, change the root word’s meaning but not the part of speech.
Morphology is an important component of our language, even to young brains. Research studies confirm that before they learn to read, children are more cognizant of morphology than phonology (Mann, 2000). This means they comprehend more easily that the inflectional morpheme -s in dogs represents the plural of dog than that the -s in yes represents a phoneme. They also understand more easily that the -er in bigger is a comparison to something that is already big than that the -er represents the second syllable in a word like power.
Morphological and Phonemic Awareness. Of course, when students first learn to read, phonemic awareness becomes all-important as the young brain tries to match letters to sounds. But morphological awareness is already starting to develop in Grade 1 (Wolter, Wood, & D’zatko, 2009). By Grade 3, morphological awareness begins to surpass phonemic awareness in the development of decoding skills (Singson, Mahony, & Mann, 2000). Morphological awareness helps these students when they encounter multisyllabic words. A word like indisputable will be separated into its affixes and root word: in-, dispute, -able. Because such words do not appear frequently in texts, the ability to understand these words will depend far more heavily on the reader’s morphological awareness than on word recognition skills (Mahony, Singson, & Mann, 2000).
Other than helping to decode unfamiliar words, morphemes can also help the reader decide whether a word is an adjective (singing), a noun (singer), or a verb (sing), and thus assist in determining the word’s meaning. The syntactic position of the word also helps determine its grammatical aspects, and this redundant information makes the sentence easier to understand and increases reading speed. At this point, word recognition is largely automatic, and the reader can understand familiar words without consciously analyzing and decoding their phonemic characteristics. When a student can recognize enough words, the next step is to read sentences and paragraphs fluently.
“Young readers who are exposed to direct instruction on the morphological aspects of language become more capable readers than those who are not.”
A recent review of studies on morphological instruction shows that teachers do not spend enough time on direct instruction of building beginning readers’ morphological skills (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010). But in those classrooms where teachers do devote time to explaining and demonstrating phonemic variations in word structure and other elements of morphology, students become better readers. The effects of this instruction are particularly powerful with less able readers.
Is Spelling Crucial to Reading?
English spelling is a nightmare. We will discuss more about the problems that English spelling poses for beginning readers in Chapter 3. For now, we should recognize that, despite its difficulties, spelling becomes important almost as soon as the child has mastered phonemic awareness and begins to make the letter-sound correspondences. Now the new reader must match the variety of spellings to their sounds. Research studies have found that preschool children are sensitive to the orthographic patterns in the way words are spelled (Puranik & Apel, 2010). By Grade 1, children note that ck never comes at the beginning of a word, and it is always preceded by a short vowel. Older children are not likely to spell dirty as dirdy because they recognize the morpheme dirt and a suffix.
As children progress in mapping letters and sounds, they discover an important reality about spelling: Usually, the mapping from spelling to pronunciation is more reliable than from pronunciation to spelling—the same sound can be spelled in different ways. This fact apparently causes some hesitation in word identification during reading. Research has shown that the more ways a sequence of phonemes can be spelled, the longer it takes to read a sentence containing that sequence. For example, shelf is read more quickly than sneer because the rime unit /εlf/ is always spelled elf whereas the rime unit /ir/ can be spelled as ere, eer, ier, or ear (Andrews & Lo, 2013; Peereman, Content, & Bonin, 1998; Stone, Vanhoy, & Van Orden, 1997). The researchers suspect that the hesitation is caused by a feedback mechanism in the reader’s brain that verifies whether past experience supports the pronunciation of eer as /ir/. This notion demonstrates at least one way in which reading and spelling may be closely related in neural network processing.
Success in reading does not automatically result in success in spelling. Reading requires recognition whereas spelling requires production—a more complex skill that utilizes additional mental processes. Indeed, many skilled readers consider themselves to be terrible spellers. This is because so many English words do not adhere to strict phonetic rules. Almost every spelling-to-sound convention has exceptions. Nonetheless, good spelling is crucial for recognizing and decoding the meaning of words. To become an expert decoder, the reader will need to learn how to correctly identify and spell the exceptions. Studies show that the accuracy of a student’s spelling in kindergarten and Grade 1 is a predictor of later reading ability (Moats, 2005).
As students develop their spelling skills, they also increase their word recognition speed during reading. Word recognition becomes automatic, and skilled readers are now able to recognize new words based on their morphemes. For example, a student who recognizes the spelling of react in reaction will realize that the words are related and make connections between their meanings. This is the primary way in which students expand their lexicon in Grade 3 and beyond. In sum, good spelling skills usually lead to rapid word recognition and comprehension.
READING COMPREHENSION
Remember that learning to read requires close coordination between the brain’s language processing and visual recognition systems. Both systems are constantly searching for sound and visual patterns while they attempt to make sense and gather meaning from the written word. But patterns in the English language are unpredictable, not just in spelling, but also in syntax. As soon as the brain suspects it has detected a pattern, a change in word order or the insertion of another word can upset the pattern and alter the meaning. When that occurs, the brain must not only remember the original pattern, but also the exception it just encountered. This back-and-forth between “I think I see the pattern” and “Oops, the pattern didn’t work this time” can be very frustrating for beginning readers. This is especially true for boys, many of whom tend to slightly lag behind girls in language development in their early years.
Words to Sentences
Comprehension of reading material occurs when readers are able to place the meaning of individual words into the structure and context of an entire sentence. Furthermore, the reader’s ability to remember the sentence’s structure (syntax) relies on working memory. Let’s examine first the role of syntax in sentence comprehension; we will discuss working memory later in this chapter.
Syntax and Comprehension
When children read simple sentences, they grasp meaning mainly through simple associations that are already stored in the brain’s word form area and the mental lexicon. The syntax is easy, and there is little risk of ambiguity of meaning. In the sentence “The cat is white,” only one interpretation is possible. But as sentences get more complex, syntax plays an important role in comprehension. Readers are more likely to encounter ambiguity in reading than in speech because written texts tend to use complex grammatical structures more often than casual conversation.
Before beginning to
read, children already have a good sense of syntax as a result of speaking and listening. They learn that “I want cookie” sounds better (and may get more results) than “Cookie, I want” or “I cookie want.” Their brains soon recognize the SVO speech pattern: Who’s acting? (subject), What’s the action? (verb), and What’s being acted upon? (object). Interestingly enough, this syntax pattern is common to many Indo-European languages. Sentence structure gets more complicated in reading, however. There are three types of syntactic structure for sentences, as follows (SLC, 2000):
• Simple: A simple sentence contains just one main clause, for example, “The boy rowed the boat.”
• Compound: A compound sentence has two or more main clauses separated by a comma and joined by a connecting word, for example, “The boy rowed the boat, and his mother watched.”
• Complex: A complex sentence contains a main clause and one or more dependent or relative clauses, for example, “The boy who rowed the boat waved to his mother.”
Many syntactic changes can occur within these three categories that change the meaning of these sentences. Some clauses include negation (“The boy didn’t row the boat”) or contain prepositional phrases (“The boy rowed the boat to his mother”) or conjunctions (“The boy and his mother rowed the boat”). Using the passive voice will reverse the relative position of the subject and the object (“The boat was rowed by the boy”). Relative clauses can further complicate the matter by being relative to the subject (“The boy who rows the boat is lost”) or relative to the object (“The boy rows the boat that is leaking”).
How the Brain Learns to Read Page 6
