PARSING PRINT

Language skills -- SPOKEN and heard language -- is acquired instinctively (interacting with other human beings) so that by the age of three or so, most people can handle the mental connections and ability to form sounds (a matter of breath interruption) well enough to associate spoken words with both things and actions as well as “felt” meanings like unfair or love or pretty.  Even children that young can appreciate that others have feelings and can guess what they are thinking.  If they never master this task, which can easily happen in situations of abuse or neglect, they will never be fully human.  Whether they can acquire the skill later in life is open to discussion.  How to develop it is also open to discussion, but brain theory suggests that the brain under pressure and given opportunity (experiences and skills) can do almost anything.

The brain cannot develop the skill of reading in the sense of managing print unless it already has the conceptualizations of speaking and hearing words as sounds.  We know that other animals have some grasp of this, but they can’t make “our” words because their oral-pharyngeal spaces are not the right form, can’t interrupt air flow into plosives, fricatives and vowels.  Before thinking about print use (literacy) it seems logical to make sure that the person can hear the sounds of the appropriate language (esp. the ones in the back of the mouth which seem to be dropping out over the decades) and form them properly.  Local idiosyncratic pronunciations (d for t, etc.) seem to be lessening because of video where one can see the sounds being formed, though d is still hard to distinguish from t even if looking at the speaker.  Teaching this when people don’t learn it naturally is what a speech therapist does.

The most basic step of print is being able to distinguish the shapes of the letters.  (I’m only talking about English.)  The weakness of handwriting is that different people shape letters differently so that a person needs to “learn” what are essentially different alphabet shapes: a’s that are open at the top look like u’s.  But there is another difference, which is that since hunter-gatherers learn shapes from looking for animals and need to see the shape of a head no matter which way it is looking, they will not distinguish between a p and a q, a b from a d, or even a q from a d.  Until they can reliably hold that difference in their mind when looking at print, things will be difficult.  That, of course, comes after the step of realizing that each letter stands for a sound.

Letter recognition in the mode of building blocks -- one block with A on it and another with M on it -- is a prerequisite to the ability to see the same letters all in a row across a page.  It helps that they’re grouped, like a credit card code or telephone number, and there are little signals in the form of punctuation.  It does NOT help that the groups that form words are pronounced one way one time and another the next.  Most of us realize that we have two vocabularies:  one that is spoken and one that is print but never heard or said.  If we pronounce those words without having connected them to the print word, we can walk into ridicule.  For years I talked about MAN-YUR before someone figured out I meant MAN-OO-ER.  Manure.  Much laughter.

Correcting pronunciation is a very touchy business since it is so often taken to be an indication of being dumb or at least an outsider.  And yet, not knowing unreasonable links between spoken and printed words is only a lack of information, not a lack of intelligence.  Conveying that information ought to be nonjudgmental.

To make associations between sounds and printed letters some kind of brain link must be formed in a real and physical way.  We believe that it is a matter of organic cell development which means that the tissue must have the building blocks and fuel to do the job.  If there are not the necessary molecules or sufficient oxygen, the link cannot be formed or might be formed in an inadequate way.   Being deaf or having a cleft palate or whatever also interfere.

Besides pronunciation, spoken words are dependent upon rhythm which is in every language.  The inflection and syllable emphasis of a word often changes its meaning.   The ability to recognize this element is in a different part of the brain than recognition of a letter and other elements of fluency.  We know that stutterers will stop stuttering if they sing.  We know that people in the grip of strong emotion (positive or negative) might begin to stammer.  Different languages have different “tunes” so that the same words spoken with an Irish lilt will be different than if spoken with a Texas drawl.  And yet sound training is labeled “music” and considered a frill.  Some experimentation has been done with reading out loud while clapping or with drum beats.  Reading out loud  and hearing reading out loud strengthen the connection between marks on a page and sounds in the ear.  Rapping is good for your skills.  Rhyming is pleasing.

But all this -- understanding that a print shape means a sound, linking shapes into words, recognizing that words correlate with spoken sounds and that both refer to a meaning of some kind -- is only a first level of learning to read.  I’m been impressed -- and frankly appalled -- by men (mostly) who read only for plot: what happened and who was at fault.  It’s not an indicator of intelligence since the men were a full range of stupid to quick.  But they did tend to be blunted about what are often called “deeper” meanings: philosophical.  Some understood politics pretty well: strategy, interpretation of rules -- though they had a tendency to want to use force and extortion.  But they did not speculate on the “meaning of the universe” or what a human being really is.  Their horizons were close -- the here and now -- so they were not interested in other ways of life or even history.  There was no moral or religious dimension except compliance.

When the people who worry about high level education speak of “true literacy,” this is close to what they mean:  not proper pronunciation, not reading the proper books or knowing the plots of movies, but the larger patterns of human thought that are normally studied at graduate level in universities.  At that point the oral exchange of knowledge and the printed exchange of knowledge -- not because of being “more intelligent” but because of having a thick substrate of associations and references drawn from both talk and writing -- gets out past the understanding of many people.  Yet that’s where the future is often formed.  This is the goal of education beyond skill-development and forced conformity, but it is not necessarily attached to print management skills, which are only a tool.  

Once the deeper concepts learned through reading and writing are present, they can be taken to other contexts -- ANY context.  What really counts is the link with real-world experience and ability to digest and use it.  (Enjoyment counts as use.)  We seem to be losing our ability to evoke high level understanding as well as destroying the environments that protect and encourage people who do it.