Toward a Psychology of Reading

TLDR: Gebb et al. as mentioned in this paper provided a nice treatment of this topic in A Study of Writing: The foundations of grammatology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

Abstract: Given the postively accelerating growth of knowledge in the information sciences, such as artificial intelligence and linguistics, experimental psychologists have continued to enlarge their laboratories and theoretical domain. Reading-related research and practice is the theme that unifies the diverse and varied contributions to this volume. The book covers topics as diverse as the history of writing, phonological mediation in reading, eye movements in reading, the representation of meaning, and classroom practice and reading curricula. Examples of research questions are: How does higher-order knowledge contribute to perception of letter sequences, is speech recoding necessary for deriving meaning from print, and to what extent does the processing of information in one fixation control the eye movements necessary for the next fixation? On the heels of laboratory research has been the trend to close the gap between it and educational practice. Not only are researchers directing more of their energy to ecologically valid problems, educators are looking to research and theory for a foundation for practice. This book offers some materials and tools to build the bridge between the two areas. There is a large gap to span, however, and even the scaffolding remains to be built. Over a third of the book belongs to Lila Gleitman and Paul Rozin. Their thesis is unambiguous and is developed in a pleasing pedagogical manner. Reading and writing achievement is qualitatively different from speaking and listening. The latter skills are easily learned without encountering formal instruction and practice, whereas too many individuals fail to learn visible language processing skills even after years of schooling. The difference is not a modality difference per se but occurs because "the eye is not biologically adapted to language" (p. 3). In the authors' opinion, learning to read requires "a rather explicit and conscious discovery" of the structure of one's language. The major implication for teaching reading and writing is that the curriculum should mirror the critical events in the historical development of writing. Ideally, learning to read in Grade 1 should recapitulate the evolution of writing. Gleitman and Rozin provide a nice coverage of the history of writing, based primarily on I. U. Gebb's lovely treatment of this topic in A Study of Writing: The foundations ofgrammatology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). The authors develop the thesis that the development of orthography followed a very systematic evolution. At every stage of development, the number of symbols in the script was decreased with a concomitant increase in the abstractness of the correspondence between meaning and the written symbols. Although the development was often circuitious, one can order the development of writing systems by semasiography (the writing of concepts or meanings), logography (the writing of words or morphemes), and phonography (the writing of sounds) in such systems as syllabaries and alphabets. The authors follow this history with a comprehensive coverage of modern English orthography. They believe that the difficulty in learning to read English is not due to a poor spelling-to-sound system. According to this view, reading 151