Weaving back in a short poem to start our post:

The Influence Unseen of the Words We Use to Be

Part I: The Acculturation of the Mind

There is a fertile topsoil we are born with in our brains, imprinted by the interplay of sights and sounds and movement of those who interact with us. This immersive communicative theater, felt first in the womb, roots itself within the immediacy of each moment, even while gesturing at distant realms yet unknown. Climbing towards this mystery with our tongues and thoughts and technology bends the world toward our needs, and allows us to project our inner selves into the past and future. We ride rivers and build highways across our brains. This is our cultural inheritance, our storied legacy of language and literacy.

Part II: The Shadowed Underbelly of Words

Yet this glorified development harbors dissonance as well, darker truths of the animal and spirit world we project beyond ourselves and thus, distort. As we entangle each other in our webs of words, we may mirror and magnify influences unseen, that inarticulate undertow of us vs. them. When we summon forth our disgust and anger at someone or something else and wrap them into words until our vision becomes blinded, we may become its prisoners, trapped in the enchantment of language itself. As Alicia lived in the interlocution of the pages, the chatter of our minds can lead us unto rifts within. Do animals go mad, other than when rabies infects their brains? Language, in this sense, is viral, amplifying our extremes while shrouding our ensnarement. We can paint a veneer of progress over the denatured scars we leave behind.

The Deceptive Power of Language

In our last post, we ended with the suggestion that our enhanced language and literacy abilities may also occlude our connections with our wiser selves or with our natural world. This deceptive power of language is a fear that Plato raised long ago. In The Republic, Plato argued that poetry is a mere imitation of nature, and thus, inferior. Yet in this shallow deception lay great power, for the poet, through the use of melody, rhythm, and other “ingenious devices,” could take advantage of the irrational “weakness of the human mind. . . having an effect upon us like magic.” He therefore recommended that poets be banned from his ideal republic.

Echoes of these fears can be heard in The Kekulé Problem by Cormac McCarthy, in which he notes that the “unconscious is a machine for operating an animal,” and in fact “that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesnt much like language and even that it doesnt trust it.”

In The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World, by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, which we explored earlier in Language—like reading—may not be innate, they similarly note that language has evolved, and continues to evolve, far more rapidly than our brain architecture and biology can, and thus that there is something about the viral, statistical nature of language itself that has been culturally shaped for learnability to fit the human brain and continue to be passed on across generations.

One of the arguments I’ve been making through this series is that language and literacy development enhances and extends our innate capacities. Yet as with any technology that brings greater power, linguistic or literary enhancements may also be abused or misused. Any study of human herd phenomenon and its correlation to the exposure to and use of dehumanizing or manipulative words, such as bullying, propaganda, or mass killings can demonstrate this. One of the fears that accompanies AI is this very misuse of the manipulative properties of language.

We’ve explored some dimensions of this previously when we explored the enchantment that the stories we tell can have over us, such that when accepted uncritically, they can lead us to acts that would be absolutely horrific to our more rational or empathetic selves if we had not erected blinders around our own mind’s eyes and heart’s understanding. Those blinders are most likely erected and reinforced by the linguistic environment we exist within and the words we unconsciously use.

Bringing Critical Consciousness to Language

And it is here that this tension between our unconscious and language may be unpacked a little further from McCarthy’s pithy description (“the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal”) – for it may be that the more consciousness and rationality we can bring to our use of language, the more we can work to reduce the influence of harmful assumptions or generalizations; conversely, the more we internalize or use language unconsciously and uncritically, the more we may subject ourselves and others to harm.

There are a couple of lines of evidence that may reinforce this idea that are worth pursuing:

1. By distancing ourselves from our own selves by using third-person language, we can better empower ourselves to tackle psychological or emotional obstacles. Source: Stepping Outside of Ourselves to Help Ourselves
2. Similarly, by learning to speak another language, we can improve our decision-making and better cope with strong emotions when we switch between languages. Source: ‘I couldn’t believe the data’: how thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making

Beyond language, finding a way to maintain peaceful communion with our own unconscious may also be an important counterbalance. Meditation, hiking, running, music, and many other such disciplines are methods of allowing our inner chatter to simmer down to the point where we can gain momentary glimpses of what it means to stand outside of it.

Furthermore, there may be something we gain in terms of well-being, health, and learning simply from exposure to and immersion in natural environments and tree canopy, as we’ve explored in The Influence of Greenery on Learning. Our increasing detachment from and destruction of a world inhabited by a diversity of animal and plant life speaks to this non-linguistic need – while at the same time, we are struggling to find the collective language that we need to re-connect to and value our beautiful planet. If we can find a way to connect our language to the world we live in without blinding ourselves–or allowing ourselves to be blinded by those who would capitalize off of our ignorance–then there will be hope for the future of our species, and that of many other species.

#language #literacy #unconscious #innate #developed #narrative #deception #manipulation

We have spent some time picking away at the tension between the generalizations and assumptions made around whether reading and writing development is natural or unnatural.

We continue this exploration, except now we dig into an even more fundamental aspect of human development: language. Language development is a seemingly magical evolutionary development that humans have uniquely adapted—or for which language is uniquely adapted for—to the surviving and thriving of our species.

Are we born with innate capacities for language baked into our brains—a 'universal grammar'? Or do we develop and hone these capacities—albeit, rapidly—through exposure and use? Is it both? If so, how much is innate, and how much is developed? And in what way do these continued advancements of language and literacy across the generations enable our cognitive, cultural, and technological achievements? And in what way might they at the same time magnify the biases and base motivations of those most able to leverage power to manipulate others? In other words, how much does language and literacy bring us into a more generative engagement with ourselves and our world, and how much does it create a distance that may lead to destruction?

This journey continues in this series of posts:

• Language—like reading—may not be innate
• The Inner Scaffold for Language and Literacy
• Accelerating the Inner Scaffold Across Modalities and Languages
• Thinking Inside and Outside of Language
• Speaking Ourselves into Being and Others into Silence: The Power of Language

#language #literacy #innate #natural #unnatural #development #cognition

The first thing that happened to reading is writing. For most of our history, humans have been able to speak but not read. Writing is a human creation, the first information technology, as much an invention as the telephone or computer.

—Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight

What is (un)natural about learning to read and write? We began our quest with this question, prompted by two references in a line in a David Share paper.

Like learning to read (English) which Gough famously dubbed “unnatural” [43], see also [3], becoming aware of the constituent phonemes in spoken words does not come “naturally”.

—Share, D. L. (2021). Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia. Brain Sciences, 11(11), 1510.

This led us to unpack three foundational papers from 1976 to 1992 that have provided us with some surprising twists and turns and even moments, dare I say, of clarity.

Rather than spend too much time re-hashing what we’ve already covered, I wanted to take an opportunity to further reflect on what I’ve learned and on where I currently stand after all these geeky deep dives (I took a brief interlude between the 1st two papers to ruminate as well).

I believe that this debate about what is “natural” about teaching early reading is far more fundamental than it seems. For example, the “sage on the stage” vs. “guide on the side” divide surfaces in the Goodmans’ account of what effective teaching and learning should be for early reading, reflecting a deep-seated romantic tendency to elevate the status of children, wherein there is the belief that if we just allow children to learn “naturally,” they will somehow discover complex academic concepts.

This is true of social language. The swiftness with which we acquire our native language(s) as children is remarkable. Yet even here we must be careful. There are some children that do not learn and develop language at the same rate that others do, perhaps due to differences in working memory and other neurobiological reasons. This tells me that Liberman’s conjecture that speech is pre-cognitive may have been too bold.

Effortful, Rather Than Unnatural

Tracing these arguments has helped me to see more clearly that language and literacy development are on a spectrum from effortless to effortful, with another axis around the individual profile of a child that requires either more explicit instruction and deliberate practice or greater opportunities for more independent implicit learning. There are certain abilities that are more commonly effortless for most children, such as learning a first language, and others that are more commonly effortful for many, such as learning to break the code. And some children find effortless ones more effortful, and other children find the effortful ones also quite effortless (lucky them).

This applies to any skill: some kids can jump on a bike and start riding almost immediately, while others will need quite a lot of explicit modeling and practice with training wheels. Some kids can swim like a fish after a few lessons and practice, while other kids (like me) will only develop a half-sufficient dog paddle even after swim lessons, living near the ocean, and having a pool in their backyard.

The analyses of G&H and Liberman have helped me to identify more precisely where the greatest effort in learning to read in English lies: at the sublexical level—the level of phonemes and letters and letter sequences—a level that is, in their estimation, “unnatural,” because these sublexical units are “meaningless” and “artificial,” in the sense that they are “arbitrary.”

We do need to acknowledge there is an “artificiality” to written language. This artifice allows us to map “arbitrary” symbols onto our spoken language and record them for all time.

Yet I am concerned that framing learning sublexical units as completely unnatural may be a turn-off to those who would decide that teaching them is therefore antithetical to the goal of channeling the innate and “natural” curiosity and potential of children to read. I mean, there are still active and inflamed debates about phonics going on, and we’re trying to bring people on board here.

Gough and Hillinger’s analogy of learning to read to cryptanalysis is a highly useful one, but I am not convinced that warrants calling the process unnatural. Ever heard of the genetic code? Nature has its own alphabetic cipher going on!

Learning to Read is Learning to Control a Flame

Instead, I think we should focus on the fact that written language is a remarkable feat of human development, as awe-inspiring as rocket ships, as innovative as smartphones, and as individually empowering as the automobile (though with far less toxicity).

While I find Liberman’s distinction between oral language as biological in origin and written language as cultural useful, I also think it’s again more of a question of a spectrum, rather than a sharp divide. We have no biological, innate ability to create fire, for example. Our ability to create controlled flame is entirely driven by human culture. Yet fire is so deeply interwoven into the propagation of our species that it is intimately tied to our biological evolution and survival. Would we say that learning to make fire is “unnatural”?

This is mostly a matter of rhetoric, of course. The reason for G&H and Liberman’s branding of “unnatural” was to highlight the fact that learning to decode written language can be challenging, and to try and unpack exactly why that is.

So let’s instead focus on the fact that learning to break apart spoken words into little pieces of phonemes to attach them to letter sequences (and vice versa) is both abstract and effortful for many children, and also an absolutely amazing collective and individual achievement. This allows us to see that it therefore will most likely require explicit support and deliberate practice, and that furthermore it is well worth getting kids pumped up about gaining it.

This is where we also need to bear in mind the spectrum in what students bring to their first encounters with formal instruction with written language. Nancy Young’s updated Ladder of Reading and Writing is a great depiction of this spectrum, which acknowledges that there are indeed a small percentage of children for whom acquiring literacy will be mostly effortless, while for the majority of kids, a structured literacy approach is needed, with more intensity required for some.

We also know that students bring different spoken dialects and languages to the classroom, and the nature of those dialects and languages may influence the form of code-based instruction that could be highest leverage.

Let’s also remember a caution that both Gough and Goodman made in their respective papers: we can’t just hand over a codebook of rules to our kids. They must ultimately internalize the cipher themselves. What is the right balance of explicit and implicit learning, of difficulty and ease, of guided and independent practice? What are the profiles of student that we have in our classroom, and how can that guide us in determining the level of structure that we need to provide?

Well, clearly, there’s more to explore here, with plenty of controversy remaining. If you’ve stuck with me this far, I salute you! Thanks for reading.

#natural #unnatural #innate #language #literacy #reading #writing #heterogeneity #implicit #explicit

Discuss...

As I began my great awakening to the relatively extensive body of research on reading, one of the claims of reading research proponents that I’ve picked up on and carried with me is the idea that reading is unnatural and our brains were not born to read. And this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, given that oral language has been around for a very long time (though we don’t know, of course, exactly when it showed up), while writing systems only showed up roughly 5,000 years ago.

This claim is useful as a device for grounding an argument against the unfortunate “whole language” theories that have dominated education, which gave teachers the inaccurate belief that acquiring reading happens organically via exposure to read-alouds and engaging literature. We know that there are indeed many children who are able to break the cipher of writing systems on their own, but also that there are just as many who do not without explicit and systematic instruction. Furthermore, there are a subset of those children who will struggle to decode even with explicit instruction which we label dyslexia.

By claiming that our brains were not born to read, we give a strong logic for explicit decoding instruction. Furthermore, it gives us a narrative that makes sense of the complexity and interconnectedness of the brain activity of skilled readers in comparison to those who struggle to decode. As I’ve narrated in other posts, this is the story of “bootstrapping” reading onto our preexisting visual and aural and motor networks, and a further explanation of why sufficient opportunity for structured, guided practice must be provided alongside explicit instruction: so that those interconnections and pathways between disparate parts of the brain can be made and decoding can be done with accuracy and automaticity.

So you can see why the claim–that reading is unnatural–is compelling. It equips us to argue for more effective instruction, it explains dyslexia, and it synthesizes brain research with an evolutionary explanation. Experts such as Maryanne Wolf, Mark Seidenberg, and Stanislas Dehaene have made this argument, with plentiful reference to research of course, in their respective books on reading. For a really short and to the point argument on why reading is unnatural, check out G. Reid Lyon’s piece in ASCD, “Why Reading Is Not a Natural Process.”

Yet I’ve begun wondering recently if the overall claim is just a little too neat and tidy.

In my last post, I realized that some of the neat and tidy stories I had about learning and phonology prevented me from understanding the state of the research on effective PA instruction more clearly, and I think that realization made me more attuned to the danger of the mini-stories we tell that we can stick confirmatory evidence to.

It’s not that the claim is wrong, mind you. It’s that it may be oversimplifying something just a tad more nuanced. Let’s unpack it a little.

If oral language is considered “biologically primary,” while reading is “biologically secondary,” then that helps to explain why some kids really struggle to decode, and the existence of dyslexia. Except that there is a similarly significant subset of the population that struggles with language! Not only that, but many of the same kids who struggle with decoding ALSO struggle with language, and vice versa. Hmm. Why would some kids struggle to develop such a biologically primary ability? Isn’t it the WRITTEN word that is so “unnatural”?

It may be that language itself is just complex, no matter how intimately tied to our evolutionary past it may be, nor how swiftly and organically acquired by most. And as with reading, language develops our brains beyond whatever capacity they may have had in its absence. In fact, it may be that language rich interactions and environments accelerates the development of our brains, an idea supported by comparison to those who have suffered extreme isolation, abandonment, or neglect in early childhood. In this sense, then, language is a social and cultural artifact, in addition to an evolutionary biological adaptation. And because of the great variability in human development and the complexity of language, some still struggle to gain the nuanced and inferential chains of sounds, verbal forms, syntax, and meaning.

And what kind of language are we talking about when we say it is acquired “naturally,” anyway? Sure, everyday language is picked up swiftly by most, but it is the language that is more specific to academic domains and written texts, typically called academic language, that is the language that proves more difficult for some to acquire.

Writing is a more recent social and cultural development, but interestingly, it may have arisen spontaneously in three or four disparate locations at time periods not too far distant from one another. If this is so, it suggests that this technology addressed a common problem that our species needed to solve for, and hence it was adopted and scaled just as pottery and roads were across civilizations.

Are water jugs and other tools a biologically primary part of our brains? It almost seems silly to ask. No, opposable thumbs are biologically primary, and quite useful, but the tools we have developed and expanded and iterated upon in each generation are such interwoven extensions of our existence and culture that we wouldn’t normally pause to consider it.

So this invention of writing systems and hence the ability to read is a social and cultural extension of our capabilities that has accelerated our collective efficacy. And just as with oral language, developing this ability as an individual is complex, determined by our social, cultural, and environmental circumstances, and layers upon whatever biological equipment we’ve evolved for.

There is even initial brain research that complicates the narrative that our brains were “not born to read.” A 2020 study “provides the earliest possible evidence in humans that the cortical tissue that will likely later develop sensitivity to visual words has a connectivity pattern at birth that makes it a fertile ground for such development—even before any exposure to words [bold added].

We may be overselling the idea that our brains were not born to read, and that learning to read and write are so very difficult. Instead, let’s focus on how our brains are enriched and enhanced by learning to speak, read, and write language that is more abstract and complex. Learning written language expands our minds and our horizons.

But let me be clear, my caveats have nothing to do with picking things up “organically”! In fact, what I am arguing is that not only must we teach decoding explicitly and systematically, but that we must further teach academic language explicitly and systematically, because neither of these forms of language are “natural.” Yet our species and our civilizations have invented and scaled and sustained them because they bring us great power that is far beyond what we would have without them. And hence, why it is so critical that we attempt to provide this power of written and academic language to every child in our world.

So yes, we need to acknowledge the barriers that prevent children from gaining these powers, and tackle them headfirst. But these barriers are not barriers because reading is some alien thing being superimposed upon their delicate and fragile brain — they are barriers because of a lack of sufficient and coherent instructional opportunity.

So what is the new mini-story I’ve crafted here? I agree that learning to read must be taught explicitly! But I don’t think it’s fully accurate to say that our brains were not born to read. I would say instead that it is our birthright to learn to read and to speak and write and think in the language that allows us to transport our minds and hearts into worlds far beyond that of our everyday lives. And it is therefore incumbent on those of us responsible for teaching our children this language to ensure that all of them will be equipped and empowered to do so.

#brain #research #language #literacy #research #innate #unnatural #natural #learning #reading