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January 18 - January 29, 2022
In the first, the occipital-temporal area (which includes the hypothesized locus of “neuronal recycling” for literacy), we become proficient visual specialists in whatever script we read.
In the second, the frontal region around Broca’s area, we become specialists in two different ways—for phonemes in words and for their meanings.
In the third, the multifunction region spanning the upper temporal lobes and the lower, adjacent parietal lobes, we recruit additional areas that help to process multiple elements of sounds and meanings, which are pa...
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Indeed, not only are words in the kana syllabary read faster than the logographic kanji;
children learning more regular alphabets, such as Greek and German, gain fluency and efficiency faster than children learning less regular alphabets, such as English.
CLAIM 2: THE ALPHABET STIMULATES NOVEL THOUGHT BEST
As humans learned to use written language more and more precisely to convey their thoughts, their capacity for abstract thought and novel ideas accelerated.
CLAIM 3: THE ALPHABET FACILITATES READING ACQUISITION THROUGH ENHANCED AWARENESS OF SPEECH
The ancient Greeks discovered that the entire speech stream of oral language could be analyzed and systematically segmented into individual sounds.
we speak at a rate of about 125 to 180 continuous words per minute, with no acoustic cues at the beginning or end of our words.
If the Sumerians were the first known general linguists, and the Sanskrit scholars were the first grammarians, the Greeks were the first phoneticians.
unexamined life is not worth living for a human being,
the very process of writing one’s thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to discover new ways of thinking.
In other words, the writer’s efforts to capture ideas with ever more precise written words contain within them an inner dialogue, which each of us who has struggled to articulate our thoughts knows from the experience of watching our ideas change shape through the sheer effort of writing.
Underneath his ever-present humor and seasoned irony lies a profound fear that literacy without the guidance of a teacher or of a society permits dangerous access to knowledge.
The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process, and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one.
But the realization that everything has its own name typically comes at around eighteen months and is one of the insufficiently noted eureka events in the first two years of life.
Phonological development, a child’s evolving ability to hear, discriminate, segment, and manipulate the phonemes in words, helps pave the way for the critical insight that words are made up of sounds—for example, that “cat” has three distinct sounds (/k/-/a/-/t/).
Semantic development, a child’s growth in vocabulary, contributes an ever-increasing understanding of the meanings of words, which fuels the engine of all language growth.
Syntactic development, a child’s growth in acquiring and using the grammatical relationships within language, paves the way to understanding the growing compl...
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WHAT THE LANGUAGE OF BOOKS TEACHES US ALL
First, and most obviously, the special vocabulary in books doesn’t appear in spoken language.
Another feature of the language of books involves a beginning understanding of what might be called “literacy devices,” such as figurative language, particularly metaphor and simile.
the principal regions of the brain that underlie our ability to integrate visual, verbal, and auditory information rapidly—like the angular gyrus—are not fully myelinated in most humans until five years of age and after.
They learn that printed words represent spoken words; that spoken words are made up sounds; and, very importantly, that letters convey those sounds.
in the affluent community there were around 200 books.
Reading never just happens.
Emerging Pre-Reader
The major insight in this period is that reading never just happens to anyone.
Novice Reader
Learning all the grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules in decoding comes next for her, and this involves one part discovery and many parts hard work.
WHEN “CAT” HAS THREE SOUNDS, NONE OF WHICH IS “MEOW”: PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
Novice readers can hear and segment the larger units. Gradually, they learn to hear and manipulate the smaller phonemes in syllables and words, and this ability is one of the best predictors of a child’s success in learning to read.
Phonological or sound blending involves the child’s larger ability to synthesize—literally, to blend—individual sounds to form larger units such as syllables and words (blending s + a + t = sat).
Children learn more easily when there are two main emphases: on the initial sound of a syllable, called the onset; and on the final vowel + consonant pattern of a syllable, called the rime (the “at” of “cat”).
Reading aloud underscores for children the relationship between their oral language and their written one. It provides novice readers with their own form of self-teaching, the “sine qua non of reading acquisition.”
“WHO SAID YACHTS ARE TOUGH?”: WHY ORTHOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT PREPARES KIDS TO READ THIS TITLE
Orthographic development consists of learning the entirety of these visual conventions for depicting a particular language, with its repertoire of common letter patterns and of seemingly irregular usages.
But the real task involves learning the unique ways that English conveys its sounds in varied but English-specific letter patterns.
How could anyone invent a writing system that forces five vowels (plus y on occasion) into double and triple duty to make up more than a dozen vowel sounds?
A dreadful language? Why, man alive, I’d learned to talk it when I was five. And yet to read it, the more I tried, I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five.
DISCOVERING THAT A “BUG” CAN SPY! SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NOVICE READERS
children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their school years, and that at least 9,000 of these words need to be learned by the end of grade 3,
There once was a beautiful bear who sat on a seat near to breaking and read by the hearth about how the earth was created. She smiled beatifically, full of ideas for the realm of her winter dreams.
“Sight-words” add important elements to the achievements of novice readers. “Sight-chunks” propel semi-fluency in the decoding reader.
WHAT’S IN A WORD? THE SEMANTIC, SYNTACTIC, AND MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A DECODING READER, OR NOT
words like “sign” and “signature” provide perfect ways to illustrate to children the morphophonemic nature of the English writing system and the very good reasons for seemingly unnatural silent letters like “g” in “sign” and “c” in “muscle.”
Fluency is not a matter of speed; it is a matter of being able to utilize all the special knowledge a child has about a word—its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings—fast enough to have time to think and comprehend. Everything about a word contributes to how fast it can be read.
It is the beginning of what will ultimately be the most important contribution of the reading brain: time to think.
After all the letters and decoding rules are learned, after the subterranean life of words is grasped, after the various comprehension processes are beginning to be deployed,
