Development of Orthographic Knowledge and the Foundations of Literacy

A Memorial Festschrift for edmund H. Henderson

Shane Templeton, Donald R. Bear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135438975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This volume unites spelling and word recognition -- two areas that have largely remained theoretically and empirically distinct. Despite considerable advances in the investigation of processes underlying word perception and the acknowledgement of the seminal importance of lexical access in the reading and writing processes, to date the development and functioning of orthographic knowledge across both encoding and decoding contexts has rarely been explored. The book begins to fill this void by offering a coherent and unified articulation of the perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive features that characterize an individual's advancing word/orthographic knowledge, providing evidence for a common knowledge base underlying spelling in writing and word recognition in reading. From a developmental perspective, the studies and syntheses presented in this volume blend insights from psychology and language study with those from clinical and classroom observations. These insights help explain how individuals, from preschool through adolescence, develop knowledge of the orthographic system underlying word structure in English and how they apply this knowledge in actual writing and reading contexts. Implications are drawn for the assessment and teaching of spelling, vocabulary, and word analysis from primary through middle grades.

1	The Interface of Lexical Competence and Knowledge of Written Words

Edmund H. Henderson

University of Virginia

In this chapter I will relate research about spoken and written language to the teaching of reading and writing. My intention is to provide a background for and a prelude to the particular studies and essays that will comprise the successive chapters in this volume. To accomplish this aim it will be necessary to sketch in a wonderfully broad and complex terrain of scholarship, a playing field upon which some of the finest scholars of our century have labored. As for the whole of this work let it be said at the outset that I agree with Huey (1908/1968) on two points. We still may hope at best for penultimate knowledge of our topic (p. 6). Nonetheless, we are “working toward daylight” (p. 102).

How should we tackle a topic this complex? One feels like the first designer of the parachute pack. One knows how it should look in the end, but facing thousands of square feet of silk, where does one make the first fold? My scheme will be to declare at the outset what I conceive to be the delimiting parameters of reading and writing. Both I think are incredibly complex but only subtly cognitive behaviors. My position is that while we may have learned something about reading behavior and its neural architecture, we are light years away from understanding comprehension as a psychological construct. We should take our guidance for exercising the latter from philosophers and poets.

Second, in this chapter I intend to draw upon my reading and thought about the origins of spoken and written language as these have been dealt with over recent years and with the history of written English. With some notable exceptions (Horn, 1957; Venezky, 1967, for example), this rich source has been largely neglected since Huey’s very interesting accounting in 1908. I will argue in fact that these evolutionary events provide a powerful source of understanding about when and how children learn to read and write.

Thirdly, I will be concerned with the experimental research in verbal learning that has enjoyed such a bloom over the past two decades. These scholars rose to Huey’s challenge like knights, and while their particular quest is not mine, I hope to show that their work and ours begins to show an interesting convergence.

In the main I am inclined to embrace Fodor’s (1983) concept of the modularity of language as a “faculty”—innate, mandatory, encapsulated, domain-specific, and of shallow output. I am encouraged to find that Stanovich (1988) seems to concur on this point, for I believe that most of the verbal learning and eye movement research of recent years tends to illuminate this aspect of the reading process. Indeed 1 was tempted to subtitle this chapter “Teaching the lexicon to read and spell.”

In the fourth section of this chapter I will describe the educational/developmental model that my students and I have followed as we have tried to map, in pupil behaviors, the benchmarks that children reach and the progressions that they follow as they advance toward a mature level of literacy. My focus will be on knowledge of word rather than on text comprehension, the rationale for which I will present shortly. In this section also I will show where our perspective tends to support or to contradict some of the experimental work. For example, I will suggest where phoneme segmentation does in fact lie in the progression of written language acquisition, and I will consider the role of rhyme production and recognition as an aspect of phonological awareness.

This chapter will end with a brief sketch about implications for teaching. A fuller treatment of this topic will conclude the volume.

THE LIMITS OF READING AND WRITING

Put baldly my belief is that the work of Lenneberg (1967) and the standard theory of Noam Chomsky (1968) provide a sound and continuingly sound conceptualization of language and of written language acquisition. I mean no silliness by writing this, for I know full well what a battering Chomsky’s ideas have suffered since they changed the face of American psychology in the 1960s. What I insist, however, is that the very simple properties that he first ascribed to language are correct in terms of what we know physiologically, and that they also make good sense psychologically, given the limits of our vision in that discipline. To be sure, the related notion of innateness and the Language Acquisition Device is not useful (nor is it in fact necessary to the model). Neither is it necessary to reject the general model because a particular set of transformational schemes fails the test of “psychological reality.” Certainly language is acquired and this occurs only interactively in a sociocultural setting (Bruner, 1983). To say that language is thus “learned” seems quite reasonable.

On the other hand, language, in the rich form that we know it, is species-specific. (Let’s have no “monkey business” about that!) Language is physiologically lateralized, neurologically incredibly rich in connectivity, and phenomenally so robust that the Lenneberg notion of “resonance” becomes attractive indeed, even if it too is nonexplanatory.

Some years ago my colleague Professor James Deese invited my student, Mary Abouzeid (see this volume), to review the literature thrpugh 1985 in order to determine “what was left” of Lenneberg’s theories after a decade. One hundred and seventy entries later, her conclusion was “everything!” Of course there is one exception that she noted. Later work (Geschwind, 1979) reported strong evidence that the to-be-dominant hemisphere is determined in utero and is thus probably genetically fixed. This fact does not deny, however, the initial plasticity of the brain through which language can develop at need in either hemisphere or its inability to do so past pubescence.

The basic point that I wish to make is that language is a specialized neurophysiological function. It is one that calls on auditory, articulatory, motor competencies and, in the case of writing, highly specialized visual competencies. These conjoin in ways that are far from fully understood, to realize oral language apprehension and production as well as reading and writing. At the base there is an intricately connected lexical and syntactical focus. Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas operate, perhaps like filters, to realize language. Between the predication of the speaker and the apprehension of the listener a generative system may intercede.

And where is thought in all this? Well, for one thing thought is not lateralized. Language serves thought and because it can function autonomously, tacitly, automatically, it can both nourish thought and express the predication of the thinker. But the thinking part is always prior to and well after any discrete language event itself.

The temporal relationships of language and thought are well illustrated by Eric Brown, who was a student and protege of Lenneberg (Brown, 1981). In Brown’s model, one second of reading is mapped on a flowchart, the nodes of which have (at least in the initial phases) determined neurological counterparts and for which the temporal flow of information is documented. The arousal mechanism that will determine the next fixation is in operation well before the first categorical scan operates on the iconic store of the letters fixed upon (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989). In Brown’s model there are many shortcuts; so the whole possible operation need not be carried through. This allows for that familiar “uh huh” that one almost senses as one reads. Linguistic knowledge in a state of automaticity makes for greater reading speed. In contrast, the beginning reader or faltering mature reader may have to maintain conditions by actually reading aloud in order to hold information in place over time. A major point to be made, however, is that there is not time to guess. Only when reading stops may one do conscious guessing. And so it is in my opinion that reading is a psycholinguistic knowledge game and not a guessing game at all. We will return to these ideas later on when we consider different models of the reading process.

I am well aware that my position on this matter may offend devotees of the whole language movement, but I hope it will not, and I think it should not. I do see word knowledge as a separate entity and as the central feature of reading. If the verbal percept were nourished by context, as I once thought to be likely, then I should think differently. But the data show us that the two are independent. A careful rereading of Huey will show, I think, that he would not have been surprised by this turn of events. In discussing the “word effect,” he concluded that words were not perceived by letter but by words and phrases. “The simple fact is that words … are thrown outward, projected upon a page … some-what as a lantern might throw them outward upon a screen” (Huey, 1908/1968, p. 106). Repeatedly he used the “lantern slide” metaphor:

For our purposes here consciousness may best be thought of as in the brain, totally in the dark as to physical environment, constructing even its light as well as its forms and meanings according to the excitations that come in to it and their relations to those that have previously come in. I raise here no question of idealism, and there need be no discussion of metaphysics.

Of course the whole matter could be stated equally well in terms of James’ radical empiricism, without affecting the argument here. I have come to consider the doctrine of James to be nearer the truth. However, my thought about perception in reading is doubtless more intelligible as stated in terms of my working hypothesis of plain dualism. (Huey, 1908/1968, p. 106 and footnote 2)

Many students of reading, myself included, interpreted these conclusions to mean that the total mental set and intellectual history of the reader bore upon the percept at every fixation. And we did so despite Huey’s remarks about the limitations of attention during so brief an exposure period. The key to it lies in the phrase “excitations that come into it.” The referent for that must be word, phrase, syntactic group, or some other lexical marker. It cannot be yesterday’s lunch or any other equipotential notion. Moreover if belief overrides the stimulus, then reading has ceased and something akin to writing or guessing or plain self-deception has taken over.

Both the work of Perfetti (1985) and Vellutino (1979) support this general position. Specifically, Perfetti shows that increased automaticity of word response affects comprehension positively but the inverse does not. Vellutino’s work makes it entirely clear that dyslexia is not an intellectual failure or a peripheral failure in or among the modalities but a language failure that diminishes or decimates the learner’s ability to identify words (Vellutino, 1979; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987).

What then may be said about the recent and continuing heavy emphasis upon research in reading comprehension (e.g., Anderson et al., Becoming a Nation of Readers, 1985)? Certainly if children can read we want them to read freely and to think responsibly about what they read. These are sociocultural and philosophical matters about which we feel deeply. As such they are germane to education; in a sense they must be held the major goal of education in a democratic society.

Thus it is that purposeful reading, the quest for information, ideas, comforts, and challenges will inevitably be the motivating force of reading and writing without which no practical skillfulness would be likely to emerge. But on equal balance stands the fact that no reading occurs—purposeful or purposeless—unless a successful integration is achieved between the oral lexicon and its graphic representations—words.

In general, I am suspicious of most psychological models of the thinking process as they relate to reading. Again I believe that philosophers, literary critics, semanticists, thoughtful teachers are better guides, than the numerous scaffolds, schemata, maps, and metaphoric architectures that have emerged in such abundance in recent years. Pedagogically the problem is that these superstructures divert the child’s and the teacher’s minds from the issues given, and instead set him or her to thinking about thinking, which patently is not the way to do it. Beginning with Ausubel’s organizers (1960) and ending perhaps with Bruner’s scaffolds (1960), there comes to be the false notion that there is such a thing—like a pep pill—called “preteaching” that makes teaching possible. Obviously, if we had that “trick” we wouldn’t have to teach at all.

To summarize this section, my view of reading is both a broad one as regards comprehension and a narrow one as regards the fundamental mystery of written word identification. I am reminded of some lines of the poet T. S. Eliot (also less fashionable today than he was in my youth). They come from Burnt Norton, the first of the “Four Quartets”:

… After the Kingfisher’s wing
Answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

Eliot’s Kingfisher, of course, is language, wholly independent, reflecting thought and bonded to it in the universe of being. So do poets often forecast the cutting edge of science.

THE MILLENNIUM AND LONG AGO

Some years ago an anthropologist friend of mine, Frederick Richardson, counseled thus: “Don’t say when language began because you will soon find that it began very much earlier!” Accordingly I will merely say that current evidence suggests that humankind existed a million or so years ago, perhaps even two, on the eastern edge of the Olduvai Gorge in Africa. It also is clear that these people used chipped tools, among them missiles that were thrown to moving targets. Our inference is that just as shooting and throwing require the simultaneous exercise of purpose and execution, then we may suppose that these early people enjoyed a lateralized brain structure and that this laterality included the first elements of language. Physically rather weak but agile and gifted in brain–weight ratio, such creatures enjoyed the possibility of cooperative action. Both this state and tool making (a projection outward from the mind) required name. “Don’t hand me the rock; hand me the missile.” Not, “go there and go there,” but “Michael, go there; and Frank, go there.”

In this coalescence of hand-eye motor competence governed by a purposeful mind one sees the emergence of self and other and the inevitable march from Eden where self-reliance alone can sustain those who live beyond their ecological niche. Thus what little we know and can surmise suggests forcibly that language is deeply embedded in the human system, unique to the system and an interactive product of that system.

In the mid-1970s a conference was held in New York City on the topic “Origins of Language.” It was the first such conference held in a hundred years, the question having been outlawed heretofore as manifestly speculative and thus unscientific. Modern technology now offers a renewal of such inquiry. P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. The Interface of Lexical Competence and Knowledge of Written Words
• 2. Patterns of Orthographic Development into the Intermediate Grades
• 3. Concept of Word: A Pivotal Understanding in the Learning-to-Read Process
• 4. The Relationship Between Word Recognition and Spelling
• 5. The Vowel and What Follows: A Phonological Frame of Orthographic Analysis
• 6. The Prosody of Oral Reading and Stages of Word Knowledge
• 7. The Developmental Acquisition of Silent Letters in Orthographic Images
• 8. An Integrated View of Word Knowledge: Correlational Studies of the Relationships Among Spelling, Reading, and Conceptual Development
• 9. Children’s Spelling of English Inflectional Morphology
• 10. Theory, Nature, and Pedagogy of Higher-Order Orthographic Development in Older Students
• 11. Stages of Word Knowledge in Reading Disabled Children
• 12. Review and Commentary: Stages of Spelling Development
• 13. A Summary and Synthesis: “Teaching the Lexicon to Read and Spell”
• Afterword
• Author Index
• Subject Index