One piece I briefly mentioned in that post and which I’d like to dig further into is from David Share, “Is the Science of Reading Just the Science of Reading English?“

This is an important question to ask, because while research into how children who speak English learn to read in English has become quite substantive (even if still mostly unknown in too many classrooms), there is still quite a bit we don’t know about learning to read in English if you don’t speak English as your first language, and there’s even more we don’t yet know about learning to read in languages other than English.

Share’s main critique against the “science of reading” is that it is “Anglocentric,” such that research presented on reading in English doesn’t even take the time to mention that it is about English and seems to expect findings to bear universal implications, whereas any research in another language explicitly notes that specificity, with an expected delimitation of applicability mostly to that language itself.

I have seen such vanilla bias in my own writing — when reviewing my updated post for Nomanis, [“I think I was wrong about phonemic awareness,”])https://www.nomanis.com.au/blog/single-post/i-think-i-was-wrong-about-phonemic-awareness) for example, I realized that I hadn’t specified I was referring specifically to phonemic awareness as it relates to English — and updated my post accordingly. And I think the post is much clearer and accurate as a result of this.

The fact is that when it comes to something like phonemic awareness, this linguistic skill is most critical for learning to read in an alphabetic language such as English — whereas “in reading syllabaries and morphosyllabaries phonemic awareness is not a uniformly important factor” (Verhoeven & Perfetti).

What is universal across languages and writing systems is the importance of phonology: “The predictive power of syllable-level awareness across different writing systems and languages – including alphabets, which do not encode syllables – highlights the general importance of attention to the sound structure of a language for learning to read” (Verhoeven & Perfetti). When we discuss learning to read in English, phonemic awareness surfaces as a critical subskill of phonological awareness that develops reciprocally with learning the alphabet, and that furthermore, higher level phonological awareness is developed via phonemic awareness training with letters. But if we were teaching our kids to read in Mandarin Chinese or Japanese, we would be far less concerned with stressing phonemic awareness in pairing symbols to speech, because that wouldn’t match the encoded language forms we would be trying to teach to our students.

While Share acknowledges the importance of phonology in all written languages, he challenges how Anglocentrism has biased our viewpoint of the concept, such that we tend to think of phonological awareness linearly in a written language. Yet he argues that “many writing systems…exhibit substantial nonlinearity, or multilinearity with multiple axes.” In English, we think of phonological awareness in relation to reading as sounds “strung along a single (acoustic) axis.” But what does “nonlinearity” even mean in phonological awareness?

It took me a while to begin to understand what Share is saying about this, as he doesn’t provide a more concrete example until later in the paper. It did take me on a fruitful rabbit hole excursion on investigating “extralineal diacritics” (searching for this term brings up more papers by Share!), but I didn’t fully get what he meant until I reread this example under the section “Multilinearity and Nonlinearity”:

In Devanagari, for example, a noninitial /i/ is written before the consonant after which it is pronounced, and this nonlinearity appears to create problems for the learner (Kandhadai & Sproat, 2010). In Malayalam, the official (scheduled) language of the southern Indian state of Kerala, the syllable pronounced /ktro:/ is written with the symbol for /r/ preceding the symbol for /k/ and the two-part vocalic circumfix for long /o:/ surrounding the ktr consonant cluster, so the reader decodes the five-symbol string ക്ത്രോ in the following order: 3, 4, 2, 1, 5! In some scripts, characters are nested in vertically aligned syllabic units, such as Indic aksharas, Arabic mashkul script, and Korean syllable blocks, which may facilitate reading acquisition (at least initially) by obviating the need to access phonemes. Chinese semantic-phonetic character compounding typically positions the semantic component to the left of the phonetic, but this component can also appear above, below, after, or surrounding the phonetic.

This is an important aspect to consider when learning to read other languages, as “Learning the many positional regularities (and exceptions) of a script appears to tax visuospatial skills (McBride, 2016; Yang & Meng, 2020), a factor that the science of reading has concluded is unimportant in English reading (Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling & Scanlon, 2004).”

Share also claims that Anglocentrism originally resulted on a focus primarily on word reading accuracy, rather than rate and fluency. This may have been true in the past, though I certainly have not seen this in my own time in the field, so thankfully that has been rectified. But part of Share’s point is also that for reading in other languages, speed and fluency are often the more important factors in reading development, especially in relation to dyslexia.

Here he makes an interesting statement: “These observations suggest that reading rate may be the most intractable component of the reading of students with reading disability/dyslexia and perhaps the core deficit.”

Another casualty of an Anglocentric focus has been that the “study of meaning (i.e. morphology, morphological awareness) . . . has only begun receiving the research attention it deserves over the past decade or so. . . it is clear that morphology has replaced fluency as the neglected stepchild of the science of reading.” He has a point here — I’ve become more and more aware of the importance of morphology in my own practice, most especially for students learning the English as a new language, and it does seem to be growing as an area for research.

According to Share, these and other biases based on focusing solely on English and other European languages have meant that our views of orthographic complexity are limited and do not yet have universal applicability. The few theoretical frameworks that can describe cross-linguistic orthographies, “orthographic depth” and “psycholinguistic grain size theory,” “promote the one-dimensional view of script variation.”

To combat this, Share proposes 10 dimensions of orthographic variety that can do more to be inclusive of global diversity:

1. Spoken–Written Linguistic Distance
2. Multilinearity and Nonlinearity
3. Visual Confusability and Visual Complexity
4. Historical Change: Retention of Historical Spellings Despite Pronunciation Change (“This category has understandably preoccupied English spelling reformers for centuries, as well as generations of Anglophone reading researchers, but may come at a price, namely, at the expense of research into other importance factors of reading (e.g. morphology, meaning)”
5. Spelling Uniformity Despite Morphophonemic Alternation
6. Omission of Phonological Elements
7. Allography
8. Dual-Purpose Letters
9. Ligaturing
10. Inventory Size

All in all, an interesting read that got me exploring many other orthographic related factors more deeply. I learned terms like “extralineal diacritics” and “ductus,” and am continuing on a quest to dig further into a statement Share makes at one point in summarizing the research on the dimension of “Spoken-Written Linguistic Distance”:

The evidence is overwhelming that when students learn to read written forms that diverge from their spoken vernacular, this has a profoundly detrimental impact on learning to read (August, Shanahan, & Escamilla, 2009; Gatlin & Wanzek, 2015; Myhill, 2014; Saiegh-Haddad & Schiff, 2016).

While there is most definitely evidence on this point, I would hesitate to state “overwhelming.” I’ll write more about this in another post!

If you’re interested in digging further into the idea of “universals” in writing systems, here’s a few recommendations to continue beyond this paper:

• Frost, R. (2012). [Towards a universal model of reading])(https://scholars.huji.ac.il/ramfrost/publications/universal-approach-modeling-visual-word-recognition-and-reading-not-only). Behavioral and brain sciences , 35 (5), 310-329.
• Verhoeven, L., & Perfetti, C. (2021). Universals in Learning to Read Across Languages and Writing Systems. Scientific Studies of Reading, 0(0), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2021.1938575 (I’ve also written a post about this paper)

#universals #language #orthography #writingsystems #multilingualism #multiliteracy

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The project is cool — the researchers have started a cross-linguistic database of brain scans, and their initial findings demonstrate a strong universal neural basis for language across multiple languages. Here’s the key finding that stood out to me:

In summary, we have here established that several key properties of the neural architecture of language—including its topography, lateralization to the left hemisphere, strong within network functional integration, and selectivity for linguistic processing—hold across speakers of diverse languages spanning 11 language families; and the variability we observed across languages is lower than the inter-individual variability. The language brain network therefore appears well-suited to support the broadly common features of languages, shaped by biological and cultural evolution. (Ayyash et al., 2021)

I found out about this paper from this Twitter thread from one of the researchers, Ev Fedorenko, and her thread also provides a neat summary of the project.

As this database of brain scans across languages is built out, it will be interesting to see what specific variations between languages and neural architecture may arise. For example, another recent paper, “Difference Between Children and Adults in the Print-speech Coactivated Network,” examined the brain scans of native Chinese speakers and found some variations from past studies in the brains of developing readers, most likely due to the difference in writing systems in terms of the lack of grapheme-phoneme correspondence for Chinese characters, as well as how a single pronunciation can have many different meanings represented by different visual characters.

Taken together, our findings indicate that print-speech convergence is generally language-universal in adults, but it shows some language-specific features in developing readers. (He et al., 2021)

Overall, it’s fascinating to see how current research converges on the significant universality across languages in terms of how literacy develops, and exciting to see that specific differences between languages and writing systems are beginning to be studied with greater specificity.

As Perfetti and Verhoeven tidily pointed out in their paper:

The story of learning to read thus is one of universals and particulars: (i) Universals, because writing maps onto language, no matter the details of the system, creating a common challenge in learning that mapping, and because experience leads to familiarity-based identification across languages. (ii) Particulars, because it does matter for learning how different levels of language – morphemes, syllables, phonemes – are engaged; this in turn depends on the structure of the language and how its written form accommodates this structure. (Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2021)

#speech #language #literacy #universal #reading #multilingualism #orthography #brain #neuroscience #research

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One I want to make sure to bring to your attention, just in case you haven’t yet read it, is this open access piece from Verhoeven and Perfetti, Universals in Learning to Read Across Languages and Writing Systems. As I’ve been learning a lot more about learning how to read and write in English, as well as about the process of language development in general, I sometimes worry that not everything I learn may generalize well, especially to languages whose writing and phonological systems differ quite substantially from English. Here’s where the paper comes in as a great resource, because the authors offer—as noted in the title—some universal principles across a number of languages, and highlight some key differences.

They highlight, for example, the extreme difficulty of English spelling among alphabetic writing systems due to its “syllabic complexity” and lack of consistent and transparent mapping of phonology. But the difficulty of learning any alphabetic writing system is nothing compared to the complexity of Chinese, which blows all other writing systems out of the water.

They also have a lovely table that compares some of the major writing and language systems to one another descriptively, which I know is a resource I will return to in the future.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2021.1938575?scroll=top&needAccess=true

In the course of this high-level examination, the authors also do us another service, which is to render intricate and complex ideas from various studies on reading into short, clear sentences.

For example, I’ve recently written about the transformation of my own thinking around phonemic awareness, and here’s Verhoeven and Perfetti succinctly stating the current state of PA research:

“Evidence in alphabetic languages for the late association between phonemic awareness and literacy suggests that phonemic awareness and learning to read alphabetically can develop reciprocally. This means that phonemic awareness is an enabler rather than a prerequisite for alphabetic reading.”

Or the need for spelling practice — something we increasingly neglect or dismiss in the U.S.:

“An important cross-linguistic finding is that spelling practice helps children internalize orthographic structures.”

There are also some interesting critiques of the Simple View of Reading in the section on comprehension:

“[the] simple view is incomplete in accounting for development of reading skill because reading itself brings about the learning of vocabulary and experience with a wider variety of grammatical structures and text types that are not experienced in typical spoken language (outside of academic lectures). Reading also increases the general knowledge that is needed to support comprehension.”

At the center of this critique is the role of vocabulary, which spans across linguistic and conceptual knowledge:

“Because so much of vocabulary is acquired following beginning reading, it is not simply a store of language knowledge waiting to be unlocked by decoding. Word meanings are continuously being retrieved, learned, and fine-tuned by reading itself. Both the quality of specific word knowledge (lexical quality) and the quantity of known words are important in supporting comprehension (Perfetti, 2007; Perfetti & Hart, 2001). It might seem convenient to subsume vocabulary under spoken language comprehension and thereby have a two-factor model of reading comprehension. However, this would fail to capture some observations about word meanings. For example, vocabulary knowledge directly supports identification of words that have exceptional spellings (Ricketts, Nation, & Bishop, 2007). A model that allows a more direct influence of knowledge of word meanings on reading comprehension may be more appropriate across languages (see Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2008). Beyond beginning reading, where only spoken language vocabulary is available, word meanings are not intrinsically part of spoken language more than written language. In both cases, they are the central connection point between coded input and comprehension, as much a component of a reading system as a language system (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014).”

I thought this was interesting in a couple of ways. First, because this resonates with my own experience as someone who read quite a lot in my formative years, and thus a large amount of the vocabulary I possess is purely in the written form — I can read it and write it, but may not have had much exposure to it in spoken language nor use it in my own speech. Second, because it brought me back to a similar critique that Mark Seidenberg made against the SVR in some endnotes to Reading at the Speed of Light, in which he states, “The main weakness in Gough’s theory is that it did not make sufficient room for the ways that the components influence each other. Vocabulary, for example, is jointly determined by spoken language and reading. Vocabulary can also be considered a component of both basic skills and comprehension.”

More to say on this additional variance for sure, but I’ll save it for another post! In the meantime, read this paper by Verhoeven and Perfetti with a pen in hand so you can mark it up yourself! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. There’s a ton of gems in there to examine more in depth.

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#language #literacy #phonemicawareness #orthography #multilingualism #reading #SVR #writing