Words to meanings.
| Number | 1115 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1999 |
| Drawer | 21 |
| Entry Date | 11/22/1999 |
| Authors | Shankweiler, D. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Scientific Studies of Reading, 3, 2, 113-127. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1115.pdf |
| Abstract | [Introduction} At the beginning of our long collaboration, Isabelle Liberman and I were concerned with testing explanations of reading problems that were current at the end of the 1960s. At that time, ideas about causation regularly invoked neuropsychological concepts such as poorly established cerebral dominance. Reversals of letters and words were still considered to be the hallmark of dyslexia (Hermann, 1958; Orton, 1925). As for treatment, that was the heyday of motor patterning, balance beams, and eye exercises. Our early work was devoted more to showing what reading disability was not than to explaining what it was (e.g., I.Y.Liberman, Shankweiler, Orlando, Harris, & Bell-Berti, 1971). Of course it is appropriate, in principle, to seek out the biological bases of reading problems. Indeed, that search has enjoyed some recent successes, but from where we stood in the 1960s, the question of mechanism was premature. The basic work of describing the phenotype had not been done. Absorbed as we were with the task of clearing away explanations of reading difficulties that ignored the phenomena of reading, we only later came to focus on the concept of phonological awareness. This idea emerged when we began to ask ourselves what could be involved in learning the alphabetic principle and why that might be so much harder for a young child than development of the spoken language. Because writing transcribes language, it seemed natural to ask how reading builds on the foundations of the child’s development of primary language. Some of the groundwork and tools we needed to pursue these questions were at hand. Research on reading was new to Haskins Laboratories at the time, but the environment of the Labs contained the right nutrients for productive ideas to take root, and the concept of phonological awareness evolved in discussions with our colleagues Alvin Liberman and Ignatius Mattingly. Making the connection between the discrete letters of the written word and the phonologic segments they represent is the core of reading. We proposed that this connection requires an awareness that all words can be decomposed into phonologic segments. But speech is not an acoustic alphabet; successive segments are coproduced in such a way that they overlap. So there cannot be simply a straightforward matching of letters and segments. We knew that the principle of alphabetic writing was considered to be a late discovery of our species. So it made sense that it might also be somewhat difficult for a child to grasp (I.Y.Liberman, 1973; Mattingly, 1972; Shankweiler & Liberman, 1972). But when we looked for research that would support this hypothesis, we came up with very little. By and large, people had not asked the question whether preschool children can apprehend phonological segments. When we carried out our own studies of the question, we found that, in general, preschool children lack awareness of phonemes, although many have some appreciation of larger phonological structures such as syllables (I.Y. Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974). So, we then had evidence in hand that at the threshold of beginning reading most children lack awareness of the phonemic segments that are the basis of alphabetic writing. Subsequently, the work of other researchers at Haskins Laboratories and elsewhere yielded direct evidence that training in phonological awareness promotes reading and spelling later on. By the mid-1980’s the importance of phonological awareness for reading was being taken seriously by a sizable group of researchers and practitioners, and by this time it had become apparent that the problems of the poor reader were not limited to achieving awareness. Problem readers also had other difficulties in the phonologic domain (in phonetic perception, naming, and memory) that we and many others have continued to explore. My purpose is to place phonological awareness in the context of the problems of reading and the other symptoms of reading disability. The need to be both brief and wide ranging forces me to be selective in making reference to the research literature; much of the documentation that a full discussion of these problems would require has had to be omitted. Because Isabelle Liberman is corecipient of the Research Award of Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), it is appropriate to note places where her influence has been especially strong. |
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