Reading, Linguistic Awareness, and Language Acquisition.

Number 516a
Year 1984
Drawer 9
Entry Date 11/18/1999
Authors Mattingly, I. G.
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Publication Chapter in Language Awareness and Learning to Read. Edited by John Downing and Renate Valtin. Springer-Verlag, New York.
url http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0516a.pdf
Abstract [Introduction] Most of us who speculate about the reading process being by considering the nature of the relationship betweening listening to speech and reading text. Are these two mental processes essentially the same, apart from a difference in input modality? Or are they essentially quite different, despite their shared linguistic character? My view is that reading, though closely related to listening, is different from it in some very crucial respects. In an earlier paper (Mattingly, 1972) I attempted to characterize the difference in terms of “primary” and “secondary” linguistic activity. I suggested that, while the primary linguistic activities of speaking and listening are natural in all normal human beings, secondary linguistic activities, such as versification and reading, are parasitic on these primary activities, and require “linguistic awareness,” a specially cultivated metalinguistic consciousness of certain aspects of primary linguistic activity. I still believe this distinction to be a valid one, but I now think that linguistic awareness is not a matter of consciousness, but of access. This access is probably largely unconscious, but the degree of consciousness is not very relevant. Moreover, what the linguistically aware person has access to is not his linguistic activity-the processes by which he actually produces and understands sentences-but rather his knowledge of the grammatical structure of sentences. Finally, I would not now wish to imply that secondary activity is less “natural’ than primary linguistic activity. I will argue, in fact, that reading involves not only the mechanisms of speech understanding but also those of language acquisition, and that is just as natural, and in a sense more “linguistic,” than listening to speech. It may perhaps disarm criticism to some degree,if, before proceeding further, I distinguish two modes of mental activity that might conceivably be regarded as reading. In the first mode, which might be called “analytic” reading, the reader identifies written words in a sentence as corresponding to specific items in his mental lexicon and makes a grammatical analysis, as a result of which he may be said to understand the sentence. In the second mode, which might be called “impressionistic” reading, the reader tries to guess the meaning of the text just by looking at the words, without making specific lexical identifications and without making a grammatical analysis. This mode of reading relies on the fact that a written word, just because it is a familiar orthographic pattern, and not because it corresponds to a lexical item, is capable of evoking a rich network of semantic associations. In the following, I am concerned almost entirely with analytic reading, justifiably, I feel. It may well be that, relying on the semantic associations of orthographic patterns and on a priori knowledge, a reasonably intelligent impressionistic reading can get the general sense of a text. Analytic reading may be slower and more laborious than impressionistic reading; it would not be surprising if the evocation of semantic associations by a familiar written word were shown to occur much more rapidly than the identification of a word as a specific lexical item. Analytic reading may even be a relatively rare act on the part of a skilled reader; depending on the nature of the text and his motivation in reading,it, he may be reading impressionistically most of the time. Yet I believe that, useful as it may be to be able to read impressionistically, a person is not a reader if he cannot read a sentence analytically when it is really essential for his understanding of a text to do so.
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