In this book I hope to push you gently toward reconsidering things you might long have taken for granted—such as how natural it is for a child to learn to read. In the evolution of our brain’s capacity to learn, the act of reading is not natural, with consequences both marvelous and tragic for many people, particularly children. (Location 266)
Thanks to imaging technology, we can actually “see” how the brain reads before and after our work is done. (Location 277)
WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. (Location 332)
Knowing what reading demands of our brain and knowing how it contributes to our capacity to think, to feel, to infer, and to understand other human beings is especially important today as we make the transition from a reading brain to an increasingly digital one. (Location 341)
There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain’s astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. (Location 355)
Underlying the brain’s ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill. Computer scientists use the term “open architecture” to describe a system that is versatile enough to change—or rearrange—to accommodate the varying demands on it. Within the constraints of our genetic legacy, our brain presents a beautiful example of open architecture. Thanks to this design, we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs. (Location 356)
As the author Joseph Epstein put it, “A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.” (Location 368)
Proust’s sanctuary and the scientist’s squid represent complementary ways of understanding different dimensions in the reading process. (Location 380)
It is said that Machiavelli would sometimes prepare to read by dressing up in the period of the writer he was reading and then setting a table for the two of them. This was his sign of respect for the author’s gift, and perhaps of Machiavelli’s tacit understanding of the sense of encounter that Proust described. While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. (Location 399)
“Passing over,” a term used by the theologian John Dunne, describes the process through which reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person’s consciousness. When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a slave feels, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we’re inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts—that we are individuals, but not alone. (Location 402)
The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children. Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts. (Location 425)
To accomplish all this without forgetting what you already read fifty words back, your semantic and grammatical systems had to function closely with your working memory. (Think of this type of memory as a kind of “cognitive blackboard,” which temporarily stores information for you to use in the near term.) (Location 434)
Unlike its component parts such as vision and speech, which are genetically organized, reading has no direct genetic program passing it on to future generations. Thus the next four layers involved must learn how to form the necessary pathways anew every time reading is acquired by an individual brain. This is part of what makes reading—and any cultural invention—different from other processes, and why it does not come as naturally to our children as vision or spoken language, which are preprogrammed. (Location 456)
The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene tells us that the first humans who invented writing and numeracy were able to do this by what he calls “neuronal recycling.” (Location 462)
Reciclaje neuronal. Argumento a favor de la teoría de los “Cognitive Gadgets” y que el ser humano es “Biológicamente cultural”.
The elegant properties of the visual system provide an excellent example of how recycling existing visual circuits made the development of reading possible. Visual cells possess the capacity to become highly specialized and highly specific, and to make new circuits among preexisting structures. This allows babies to come into the world with eyes that are almost ready to fire and that are exceptional examples of design and precision. Soon after birth, each neuron in the eye’s retina begins to correspond to a specific set of cells in the occipital lobes. Because of this design feature in our visual system, called retinotopic organization, every line, diagonal, circle, or arc seen by the retina in the eye activates a specific, specialized location in the occipital lobes in a split second (Location 476)
This unique aspect of reading has begun to trouble me considerably as I consider the Google universe of my children. Will the constructive component at the heart of reading begin to change and potentially atrophy as we shift to computer-presented text, in which massive amounts of information appear instantaneously? (Location 525)
Each major type of writing invented by our ancestors demanded something a little different from the brain, and this may explain why more than 2,000 years elapsed between these earliest known writing systems and the remarkable, almost perfect alphabet developed by the ancient Greeks. At its root the alphabetic principle represents the profound insight that each word in spoken language consists of a finite group of individual sounds that can be represented by a finite group of individual letters. This seemingly innocent-sounding principle was totally revolutionary when it emerged over time, for it created the capacity for every spoken word in every language to be translated into writing. (Location 565)
Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading. (Location 589)
prominent study found that by kindergarten, a gap of 32 million words already separates some children in linguistically impoverished homes from their more stimulated peers. In other words, in some environments the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five. (Location 592)
What is being lost and what is being gained for so many young people who have largely replaced books with the multidimensioned “continuous partial attention” culture of the Internet? (Location 631)
Across every known system, writing began with a set of two or more epiphanies. First came a new form of symbolic representation, one level of abstraction more than earlier drawings: the amazing discovery that simple marked lines on clay tokens, stones, or turtle shells can represent either something concrete in the natural world, such as a sheep; or something abstract, such as a number or an answer from an oracle. With the second breakthrough came the insight that a system of symbols can be used to communicate across time and space, preserving the words and thoughts of an individual or an entire culture. The third epiphany, the most linguistically abstract, did not happen everywhere: sound-symbol correspondence represents the stunning realization that all words are actually composed of tiny individual sounds and that symbols can physically signify each of these sounds for every word. (Location 667)
Symbolization, therefore, even for the tiny token, exploits and expands two of the most important features of the human brain—our capacity for specialization and our capacity for making new connections among association areas. (Location 728)
they studied how the brain reads pseudo words like “mbli” and real words like “limb,” in which the letters were the same but only one combination of them was meaningful. In each case, the same visual areas initially activated, but the pseudo words stimulated little activity beyond their identification in the visual association regions. For real words, however, the brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: the visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words, called phonemes; and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meanings, functions, and connections to other real words. The difference between the two arrangements of the same letters—only one of which was a word—was almost half a cortex. (Location 803)
The call system of one of our primate relatives, Nigerian putty-nosed monkeys, illustrates the importance of this type of combinatorial capacity in language. The putty-nosed monkey, like the vervet monkey, has two separate warning calls for its major predators. “Pyow” means that a leopard is nearby, and a “hacking sound” indicates the approach of the eagle. Recently, two Scottish zoologists observed that the monkeys have combined the two calls to make a new call, indicating to the young monkeys that it’s time “to leave a site.” Such an innovation among the putty-nosed monkeys is analogous to our use of morphemes to create new words, as the Sumerians frequently did in their writing system. (Location 861)
Discovered in twelve stone tablets in the Nineveh library of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria between 668 and 627 BCE, the Epic of Gilgamesh bears the name of Shin-eq-unninni, one of the first known authors in history. In this epic, which undoubtedly has motifs from far earlier oral legends, the hero Gilgamesh battles terrible foes, overcomes horrific obstacles, loses his beloved friend, and learns that no one, including himself, can escape the ultimate enemy of all humans—mortality. (Location 900)
Ancient languages like Akkadian, and other languages like Japanese and Cherokee, have a rather simple, tidy syllabic structure. Such oral languages lend themselves well to the type of writing system called a syllabary, in which each syllable, rather than each sound, is denoted by a symbol. (Location 912)
The English language is a similar historical mishmash of homage and pragmatism. We include Greek, Latin, French, Old English, and many other roots, at a cost known to every first- and second-grader. Linguists classify English as a morphophonemic writing system because it represents both morphemes (units of meaning) and phonemes (units of sound) in its spelling, a major source of bewilderment to many new readers if they don’t understand the historical reasons. To illustrate the morphophonemic principle in English, the linguists Noam Chomsky and Carol Chomsky use words like “muscle” to teach the way our words carry an entire history within them—not unlike the Sumerian roots inside Akkadian words. For example, the silent “c” in “muscle” may seem unnecessary, but in fact it visibly connects the word to its origin, the Latin root musculus, from which we have such kindred words as “muscular” and “musculature.” In the latter words the “c” is pronounced and represents the phonemic aspect of our alphabet. The silent “c” of “muscle,” therefore, visually conveys the morphemic aspect of English. In essence, English represents a “trade-off” between depicting the individual sounds of the oral language and showing the roots of its words. (Location 921)
Cumulative evidence around the world suggests that writing was invented at least three times in the last part of the fourth millennium BCE, and at least three more times in different parts of the world in later periods. (Location 992)
Cognitive efficiency depends on the third great feature of the brain: the ability of its specialized regions to reach a speed that is almost automatic. The implications of cognitive automaticity for human intellectual development are potentially staggering. If we can recognize symbols at almost automatic speeds, we can allocate more time to mental processes that are continuously expanding when we read and write. The efficient reading brain, which took Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian pupils years to develop, quite literally has more time to think. (Location 1108)
Scholars in several disciplines continue to spar over the major conditions for a “true alphabet,” based on the definitions in their own fields. Long before the discovery of the Wadi el-Hol script, the classicist Eric Havelock stipulated three criteria: a limited number of letters or characters (the optimal range was between twenty and thirty characters), a comprehensive set of characters capable of conveying the minimal sound units of the language, and a complete correspondence between each phoneme in the language and each visual sign or letter. On this basis, classicists insist that all the alphabet-like systems before the Greek alphabet fail to meet these conditions. The Semitic scripts did not depict vowels; indeed, marks for vowels in Hebrew did not appear until millennia later, when the languages spoken in everyday life (such as Aramaic and Greek) made the explicit depiction of vowels more important. For classicists like Havelock, the alphabet represented the apex of all writing; and the Greek system (750 BCE) was the first to satisfy all conditions for a true alphabet, and the first that allowed huge leaps in humans’ powers of thought. (Location 1116)
What distinguished our ancestors in ancient Greece from us was the great value the Greeks placed on an oral culture and memory. Just as Socrates probed his students’ understanding in dialogue after dialogue, educated Greeks honed their rhetorical and elocutionary skills, and prized above almost everything else the ability to wield spoken words with knowledge and power. The astounding memory capacities of our Greek ancestors are one result. They remind us of the significant effects of culture on the development of presumably innate cognitive processes, such as memory. (Location 1171)
Several scholars suggest that the Greek written alphabet came into existence largely because the Greeks wanted to preserve the oral traditions of Homer—that is, the alphabet had a role subservient to oral language. (Location 1176)
This differential use of hemispheres is clear in a fascinating early bilingual case study, written by three Chinese neurologists in the late 1930s. In their account of a bilingual person who suddenly developed alexia (lost the ability to read), they described how a businessman, proficient in Chinese and English, suffered a severe stroke in the posterior areas. What was amazing to all at the time was that this patient, who had lost his ability to read Chinese, could still read English. Today, this example no longer seems bizarre, because current brain imaging shows us how the brain can be differentially organized for different writing systems. (Location 1228)
reading in any language rearranges the length and breadth of the brain; (Location 1254)
not only are words in the kana syllabary read faster than the logographic kanji; children learning more regular alphabets, such as Greek and German, gain fluency and efficiency faster than children learning less regular alphabets, such as English. (Location 1259)
The cortical efficiency gained from a smaller number of symbols—whether alphabet or syllabary—and the consequent developmental efficiency gained during their acquisition mark one of the great transitions in the history of writing. (Location 1268)
Try to imagine a situation in which the educated members of an oral culture had to depend entirely on personal memorization and meta-cognitive strategies to preserve their collective knowledge. Such strategies, however impressive, came with a cost. Sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, dependence on rhythm, memory, formulas, and strategy constrained what could be said, remembered, and created. The alphabet and other writing systems did away with most of those constraints, thereby enlarging the boundaries of what could be thought and written by more people. (Location 1276)
By taking a meta-view of this entire history, we can see that what promotes the development of intellectual thought in human history is not the first alphabet or even the best iteration of an alphabet but writing itself. As the twentieth-century Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky said, the act of putting spoken words and unspoken thoughts into written words releases and, in the process, changes the thoughts themselves. As humans learned to use written language more and more precisely to convey their thoughts, their capacity for abstract thought and novel ideas accelerated. (Location 1284)
Sobre la teoría sociocultural.
From a cognitive perspective, therefore, it is again not that the alphabet uniquely contributed to the production of novel thought, but rather that the increased efficiency brought about by alphabetic and syllabary systems made novel thought more possible for more people, and at an earlier stage of the novice reader’s development. This, then, marks the revolution in our intellectual history: the beginning democratization of the young reading brain. Within such a broadened context, there can be no surprise that one of the most profound and prolific periods of writing, art, philosophy, theater, and science in all of previously recorded history accompanied the spread of the Greek alphabet. (Location 1293)
The ancient Greeks discovered that the entire speech stream of oral language could be analyzed and systematically segmented into individual sounds. This is not an obvious perception for anyone, in any era. It is especially fitting that the Greeks, the most vocal proponents of oral culture, discovered for themselves the underlying structure and components of speech. (Location 1301)
The great breakthrough by the inventors of the Greek alphabet—the conscious, systematic analysis of speech—happens unconsciously in the life of every child who learns to read. Young Greek pupils were given an almost perfect alphabet with almost perfect rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. As a result, these pupils could gain fluency in literacy far sooner than their Sumerian, Akkadian, or Egyptian counterparts. Beyond the scope of this book, the question emerges whether this earlier development of fluency in the ancient Greek readers resulted in the expansion of thought that helped usher in the great classical Greek period. (Location 1330)
The historical figure of Socrates represents the most eloquent apologist for an oral culture and the most vigorous questioner of a written one. Before too quickly dismissing the ambivalence of the Greeks toward the invention of the Greek alphabet, we need to ask why one of the world’s most accomplished thinkers and producers of novel thought decried its use. We turn now to an invisible war between an oral language culture and the use of written language in Greece. Plato’s careful recording of Socrates’ surprising arguments against literacy reveals tremendously important reasons why we would do well to heed them today. (Location 1339)
In writing the history of the early reading brain, I was surprised to realize that questions raised more than two millennia ago by Socrates about literacy address many concerns of the early twenty-first century. I came to see that Socrates’ worries about the transition from an oral culture to a literate one and the risks it posed, especially for young people, mirrored my own concerns about the immersion of our children into a digital world. Like the ancient Greeks we are embarked on a powerfully important transition—in our case from a written culture to one that is more digital and visual. (Location 1354)
Made immortal by Plato, the dialogues between Socrates and his students served as a model for what Socrates believed all Athenian citizens should do for their own growth as humans. Within these dialogues every pupil learned that only the examined word and the analyzed thought could lead to real virtue, and only true virtue could lead a society to justice and could lead individuals to their god. In other words, virtue, both in the individual and in society, depended on a profound examination of previous knowledge, and the internalization of its highest principles. (Location 1366)
First, Socrates posited that oral and written words play very different roles in an individual’s intellectual life; second, he regarded the new—and much less stringent—requirements that written language placed both on memory and on the internalization of knowledge as catastrophic; and third, he passionately advocated the unique role that oral language plays in the development of morality and virtue in a society. In each instance Socrates judged written words inferior to spoken words, for reasons that remain powerfully cautionary to this day. (Location 1387)
Socrates believed that unlike the “dead discourse” of written speech, oral words, or “living speech,” represented dynamic entities—full of meanings, sounds, melody, stress, intonation, and rhythms—ready to be uncovered layer by layer through examination and dialogue. By contrast, written words could not speak back. The inflexible muteness of written words doomed the dialogic process Socrates saw as the heart of education. (Location 1407)
A propósito de la preocupación social por las cosas que se pierden en cada transición significativa en las tecnologías cognitivas.
Few scholars would have been more comfortable with the importance Socrates gave “living speech” and the value of dialogue in the pursuit of development than Lev Vygotsky. In his classic work Thought and Language, Vygotsky described the intensely generative relationships between word and thought and between teacher and learner. Like Socrates, Vygotsky held that social interaction plays a pivotal role in developing a child’s ever-deepening relationships between words and concepts. But Vygotsky and contemporary scholars of language part ways with Socrates over his narrow vision of written language. In his brief life Vygotsky observed that the very process of writing one’s thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to discover new ways of thinking. In this sense the process of writing can actually reenact within a single person the dialectic that Socrates described to Phaedrus. In other words, the writer’s efforts to capture ideas with ever more precise written words contain within them an inner dialogue, which each of us who has struggled to articulate our thoughts knows from the experience of watching our ideas change shape through the sheer effort of writing. Socrates could never have experienced this dialogic capacity of written language, because writing was still too young. Had he lived only one generation later, he might have held a more generous view. (Location 1410)
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. —PHAEDRUS (Location 1435)
By committing to memory and examining huge amounts of orally transmitted material, young educated Greek citizens both preserved the extant cultural memory of their society and increased personal and societal knowledge. Unlike the judges at his trial, Socrates held this entire system in esteem not so much from a concern for preserving tradition as from the belief that only the arduous process of memorization was sufficiently rigorous to form the basis of personal knowledge that could then be refined in dialogue with a teacher. From this larger interconnected view of language, memory, and knowledge, Socrates concluded that written language was not a “recipe” for memory, but a potential agent of its destruction. Preserving the individual’s memory and its role in the examination and embodiment of knowledge was more important than the indisputable advantages of writing in preserving cultural memory. (Location 1443)
Underneath his ever-present humor and seasoned irony lies a profound fear that literacy without the guidance of a teacher or of a society permits dangerous access to knowledge. Reading presented Socrates with a new version of Pandora’s box: once written language was released there could be no accounting for what would be written, who would read it, or how readers might interpret it. (Location 1477)
Socrates’ perspective on the pursuit of information in our culture haunts me every day as I watch my two sons use the Internet to finish a homework assignment, and then tell me they “know all about it.” As I observe them, I feel an unsettling kinship with Socrates’ futile battles so long ago. I cannot help thinking that we have lost as much control as Socrates feared 2,500 years ago over what, how, and how deeply the next generation learns. The profound gains are equally obvious, beginning with Plato’s preservation of Socrates’ objections. (Location 1489)
IMAGINE THE FOLLOWING SCENE. A SMALL CHILD sits in rapt attention on the lap of a beloved adult, listening to words that move like water, words that tell of fairies, dragons, and giants in faraway places never before imagined. The young child’s brain prepares to read far earlier than one might ever suspect, and makes use of almost all the raw material of early childhood, every perception, concept, and word. It does so by learning how to use all the important structures that will make up the brain’s universal reading system. Along the way, the child incorporates many of the insights into written language that our species learned, breakthrough by breakthrough, during more than 2,000 years of history. It all begins under the crook of an arm in the comfort of a loved one’s lap. (Location 1522)
Decade after decade of research shows that the amount of time a child spends listening to parents and other loved ones read is a good predictor of the level of reading attained years later. Why? Consider more carefully the scene we just described: a very young child is sitting, looking at colorful pictures, listening to ancient tales and new stories, learning gradually that the lines on the page make letters, letters make words, words make stories, and stories can be read over and over again. This early scene contains most of the precursors crucial to the child’s development of reading. (Location 1528)
Working with premature infants highlights the importance of touch in their development. A similar principle applies to the ideal development of reading. As soon as an infant can sit on a caregiver’s lap, the child can learn to associate the act of reading with a sense of being loved. (Location 1536)
The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process, and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one. (Location 1546)
the realization that everything has its own name typically comes at around eighteen months and is one of the insufficiently noted eureka events in the first two years of life. (Location 1559)
With the emergence of naming, the content of books begins to play a larger role, for now children can direct the choice of what is read. (Location 1565)
This intertwining of oral language, cognition, and written language makes early childhood one of the richest times for language growth. The cognitive scientist Susan Carey of Harvard studies how children learn new words, something she humorously calls “zap mapping.” She finds that most children between two and five years old are learning on average between two and four new words every day, and thousands of words over these early years. These are the raw material of what the Russian scholar Kornei Chukovsky called the child’s “linguistic genius.” (Location 1568)
None of these linguistic abilities, however, develops in a vacuum. All are based on underlying changes in the developing brain, the child’s growing conceptual knowledge, and the particular contributions made by each child’s developing emotions and understanding of other people. All these factors are either nurtured or neglected by the child’s environment. To bring this idea to life, let’s first place a three-and-a-half-year-old girl, with all her “linguistic genius,” on the lap of a person who often reads to her. This child already understands that particular pictures go with particular stories and that stories convey feelings that go with the words—feelings that range from happiness to fear and sadness. Through stories and books she is beginning to learn a repertoire of emotions. Stories and books are a safe place for her to begin to try these emotions on for herself, and are therefore a potentially powerful contributor to her development. At work here is a reciprocal relationship between emotional development and reading. Young children learn to experience new feelings through exposure to reading, which, in turn, prepares them to understand more complex emotions. (Location 1585)
These stories exemplify thoughts and feelings experienced by many young children as they listen to stories and books. We may never fly in a hot-air balloon, win a race with a hare, or dance with a prince until the stroke of midnight, but through stories in books we can learn what it feels like. In this process we step outside ourselves for ever-lengthening moments and begin to understand the “other,” which Marcel Proust wrote lies at the heart of communication through written language. (Location 1607)
Sobre cómo la lectura estimula el desarrollo de la identificación con un otro la empatía.
by kindergarten, words from books will be one of the major sources of the 10,000-word repertoire of many an average five-year-old. (Location 1624)
Studies by the reading researcher Victoria Purcell-Gates underscore the more serious implications of this point. Purcell-Gates looked at two groups of five-year-old children before they could read. The two groups were similar on variables like socioeconomic status and parental educational level; but one group had been “well-read-to” in the two years before (at least five times a week), and the other, control group had not. Purcell-Gates simply asked the two groups of children to do two things: first, to tell a story about a personal event like a birthday; and second, to pretend that they were reading a storybook to a doll. The differences were unmistakable. When the children in the “well-read-to” group told their own stories, they used not only more of the special “literary” language of books than the other children but also more sophisticated syntactic forms, longer phrases, and relative clauses. What makes this significant is that when children are able to use a variety of semantic and syntactic forms in their own language, they are also better able to understand the oral and written language of others. This linguistic and cognitive ability provides a unique foundation for many comprehension skills a few years later, when children begin to read stories of their own. (Location 1634)
This kind of cognitive information is part of what goes into “schemata,” a term some psychologists use to refer to how certain ways of thinking become routinized and help a person make sense of events and remember them better. The principles here function in a self-reinforcing spiral: the more coherent the story is to the child, the more easily it is held in memory; the more easily remembered the story is, the more it will contribute to the child’s emerging schemata; and the more schemata a child develops, the more coherent other stories will become and the greater the child’s knowledge base for future reading will be. (Location 1662)
The work of my research group over many years indicates that the ability to name objects when a child is very young, and then to name letters, as the child matures, provides a fundamental predictor of how efficiently the rest of the reading circuit will develop over time. (Location 1720)
The growth of myelin follows a developmental schedule that differs for each region of the brain (for instance, auditory nerves are myelinated in the sixth prenatal month; the visual nerves, six months postnatally). (Location 1744)
Although each of the sensory and motor regions is myelinated and functions independently before a person is five years of age, the principal regions of the brain that underlie our ability to integrate visual, verbal, and auditory information rapidly—like the angular gyrus—are not fully myelinated in most humans until five years of age and after. (Location 1748)
our own research on language finds that girls are faster than boys until around age eight on many timed naming tasks. (Location 1753)
The British reading researcher Usha Goswami drew my attention to a fascinating cross-language study by her group. They found across three different languages that European children who were asked to begin to learn to read at age five did less well than those who began to learn at age seven. What we conclude from this research is that the many efforts to teach a child to read before four or five years of age are biologically precipitate and potentially counterproductive for many children. (Location 1756)
In a book called Gnys at Work: A Child Learns to Write and Read, Glenda Bissex provides a picturesque example of the period when children use the names of letters to spell words. At one point when Bissex was preoccupied (probably with writing her book), her five-year-old son slipped her this note: “RUDF.” These letters translate straightforwardly: “Are you deaf?” Bissex’s son, like countless children his age, had begun to have two insights: first, that writing can command an adult’s sometimes transitory attention; and second, the complex notion that letters correspond to the sounds inside words. What he missed was that the sound a letter represents and the name of the letter are not equivalent. The letter “r” doesn’t represent “are”; rather, it represents the sound of the English phoneme /r/, pronounced “ruh.” This correspondence between written letters and oral sounds is a subtle and difficult concept. Often parents, and even teachers who are untrained in the linguistic basis of reading, forget the complexity involved. Indeed it is a concept largely missing in most of the earlier primers used to teach reading to children. (Location 1778)
those sounds. In many children, this realization leads to (Location 1789)
children move very gradually from an awareness of what makes up a word in a sentence to syllables inside a word (e.g., “sun-ny”), until finally each individual phoneme inside a word can be segmented (e.g., “s,” “u,” “n”). A child’s awareness of the discrete sounds and phonemes in a word is both a critical component and an outgrowth of learning to write and learning to read. As we saw in the achievement of the Greeks, the meta-awareness of individual speech sounds didn’t just magically appear in the history of writing; nor does it appear magically in the child. (Location 1806)
(such as “at”) makes teaching the concept of blending (Location 1854)
Unbeknownst to them or their families, children who grow up in environments with few or no literacy experiences are already playing catch-up when they enter kindergarten and the primary grades. It is not simply a matter of the number of words unheard and unlearned. When words are not heard, concepts are not learned. When syntactic forms are never encountered, there is less knowledge about the relationship of events in a story. When story forms are never known, there is less ability to infer and to predict. When cultural traditions and the feelings of others are never experienced, there is less understanding of what other people feel. (Location 1867)
As mentioned earlier, a chilling finding in a study of one California community by Todd Risley and Betty Hart exposes a bleak reality with serious implications: by five years of age, some children from impoverished-language environments have heard 32 million fewer words spoken to them than the average middle-class child. What Louisa Cook Moats calls “word poverty” extends well beyond what the child hears. In another study, which looked at how many words children produce at age three, children from impoverished environments used less than half of the number of words already spoken by their more advantaged peers. (Location 1872)
In other words, the interrelatedness of vocabulary development and later reading comprehension makes the slow growth of vocabulary in these early years far more ominous than it appears when viewed as one unfortunate phenomenon. Nothing about language development has isolated effects on children. (Location 1885)
The importance of simply being talked to, read to, and listened to is what much of early language development is about, (Location 1891)
All professionals who deal with children can help to ensure that parents understand the contribution they can make to their child’s potential and that every child can attend a good-quality preschool. (Location 1895)
As a cognitive neuroscientist, I think that having a bilingual brain is a very good thing. Among other things, Petitto’s work demonstrates how an early exposed bilingual brain appears to have certain cognitive advantages over a monolingual brain in terms of linguistic flexibility and multitasking. (Location 1943)
Reading never just happens. Not a word, a concept, or a social routine is wasted in the 2,000 days that prepare the very young brain to use all the developing parts that go into reading acquisition. It is all there from the start—or not—with consequences for the rest of children’s reading development, and for the rest of their lives. (Location 1953)
I like to think of the interwoven relationships among the components of reading as like music: what one ultimately hears is the sum of many players, each largely indistinguishable from the rest, all contributing to the whole. Early reading is the one time in our lives when each contributing player is more discernible, enabling those of us who have long forgotten to remember what goes into every word we read. (Location 2058)
reading never just happens to anyone. Emerging reading arises out of years of perceptions, increasing conceptual and social development, and cumulative exposures to oral and written language. (Location 2084)
Few more heartwarming or exhilarating moments exist than watching children learn that they can actually read, that they can decode the words on a page, and that the words tell a story. (Location 2091)
Novice readers can hear and segment the larger units. Gradually, they learn to hear and manipulate the smaller phonemes in syllables and words, and this ability is one of the best predictors of a child’s success in learning to read. The researcher Connie Juel at Stanford found that a child’s phoneme awareness in these earliest periods was critical for learning to decode in first and second grade. Not being able to decode well in grade 1 predicted 88 percent of the poor readers in grade 4. (Location 2119)
Reading aloud underscores for children the relationship between their oral language and their written one. It provides novice readers with their own form of self-teaching, the “sine qua non of reading acquisition.” (Location 2140)