EPS mid-career prize lecture 2017: Writing systems, reading, and language

Abstract

Skilled reading reflects an accumulation of experience with written language. Written language is typically viewed as an expression of spoken language, and this perspective has motivated approaches to understanding reading and reading acquisition. However, in this article, I develop the proposal that written language has diverged from spoken language in important ways that maximise the transmission of meaningful information, and that this divergence has been central to the development of rapid, skilled reading. I use English as an example to show that weaknesses in the relationship between spelling and sound can give rise to strong regularities between spelling and meaning that are critical for the rapid analysis of printed words. I conclude by arguing that the nature of the reading system is a reflection of the writing system and that a deep understanding of reading can be obtained only through a deep understanding of written language.

Do Children Classified With Specific Language Impairment Have a Learning Disability in Writing? A Meta-Analysis

“…Although these two theoretical descriptions of the production process involved in oral language and writing make it clear that they are not identical (Rastle, 2019), both communication modes rely on many of the same underlying knowledge resources (e.g., phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic knowledge) and apply similar production processes (e.g., generating and monitoring intentions and production, translating messages/ideas into acceptable language, bringing this language to life by articulating it or putting it into written form). Theoretically then, difficulties with oral language skills or processes may manifest themselves in children's writing, as both oral language and writing draw on the same or similar knowledge and processes (Connelly et al, 2012).…”

Bridging form and meaning: support from derivational suffixes in word learning

“…Based on analysis of performance on a large-scale lexical decision task, Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera and Keuleers (2016) estimated that the average 20-year-old speaker of American English knows around 71,400 words. However, this count includes overlapping words: knowing the word accept goes a long way to supporting understanding of unacceptable (Rastle, 2019). When inflections of a given word are ignored (e.g., accepts, accepting and accepted all listed under accept), estimates of vocabulary size drop to 42,000 unique lemma types, and they are further reduced if morphological families are combined under their base word (e.g., acceptable and unacceptable counted as accept), leaving an estimated vocabulary size of only 11,100 unique base words (Brysbaert et al, 2016).…”

Children’s Reading Difficulties, Language, and Reflections on the Simple View of Reading

“…Once children can read, they have the opportunity to learn new words via reading (Nagy, Anderson & Herman, 1987) and to absorb the rich morphological cues to meaning that are evident in spelling patterns (Rastle, , 2019. Reading also provides experience with syntactic structures that are quite rare in conversation (Montag & McDonald, 2013).…”

“…Numerous studies have found associations between children's reading comprehension and their knowledge and appreciation of morphology (e.g., Levesque, Kieffer & Deacon, 2019;Tong, Deacon, Kirby, Cain & Parrila, 2011), consistent with morphology being a critical component of linguistic comprehension. At the same time, however, skilled word recognition is highly sensitive to morphological regularities that are marked in the orthography, reminding us that English is a morphophonemic in nature (Rastle, 2019;Venezky, 1999). As reading develops, the word recognition system comes to embody this structure and this is reflected in how single words are read and processed (e.g., Kearns & Al Ghanem, in press;Dawson, Rastle & Ricketts, 2017).…”