Course Description

Our brains have evolved for language and not for reading. Reading is a cultural invention. Learning to read depends on the brain learning to use a symbol system that can be responded to psychologically as though it were spoken language, that is, for the transmission of meaning. The many different types of printed symbol created by different cultures share one core feature, which is that they are a visual code for spoken language. Accordingly, individual differences in acquiring aspects of spoken language, for example phonology (sound structure), lead to individual differences in the acquisition of reading by children. Understanding phonological development and how it changes as a writing system is acquired is critical to early childhood education.

I will present cross-language data showing that “phonological awareness” is a strong predictor of reading development, and develops at three linguistic levels. These are the levels of the syllable, the rhyme and the phoneme. Phonological awareness refers to a child’s ability to detect and manipulate the component sounds of words at these different “grain sizes” (syllable, rhyme, phoneme, see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). As language develops, children learn the sounds and combinations of sounds that are permissible in their particular language, and their brains develop “phonological representations” of the sound structure of individual words. I will show that syllabic representation is basic to all languages so far studied, and that children’s ability to recognise syllables and rhymes precedes learning a particular spelling system. I will argue that this developmental view can readily explain cross-language differences in reading acquisition and in the manifestation of developmental dyslexia. I will discuss the typical trajectory of phonological development across languages, and demonstrate that individual differences in phonological awareness predict reading achievement. I will also discuss contextual variables, namely how features of written languages themselves affect this developmental trajectory in different cultures.

I will then consider possible sensory reasons for the universal developmental patterns found in pre-reading children across languages. The auditory perceptual mechanisms that underpin phonological learning appear to be the same across languages. Auditory perceptual information contains a variety of statistical cues to the sounds that make up the language and the orders in which they can be combined, along with acoustic cues to word boundaries (e.g. speech rhythm), and acoustic cues to the emotional content of speech (e.g., stress, volume). The focus of this part of the talk will be on acoustic cues to speech rhythm and syllable stress. I will show that some of the processes underpinning phonological development are disrupted in developmental dyslexia, across languages, and illustrate this with respect to basic auditory processing of the rhythmic structure of speech and nonspeech sounds. I will suggest ways in which this might impair the adequate development of the phonological system and ways in which we might think about remediating these difficulties. Finally, I will consider recent neuroimaging data relevant to this theoretical perspective.

References

Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), 3–29.

Presenter

Professor Usha Goswami

Presenter Biography

Usha Goswami, a developmental psychologist, is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. She is also Director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, which carries out research into the brain basis of literacy, numeracy, dyslexia and dyscalculia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1987, her topic was reading and spelling by analogy. Her current research examines relations between phonology and reading, with special reference to the neural underpinnings of rhyme and rhythm in children’s reading. A major focus of the research is on dyslexic and deaf children’s reading. She has received a number of career awards, including the British Psychology Society Spearman Medal, the Norman Geschwind-Rodin Prize for Dyslexia research, and Fellowships from the National Academy of Education (USA), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), and the Leverhulme Trust (UK).