The deep relations between speech and reading Mark S. Seidenberg Department of Psychology

1. The deep relations between speech and reading Mark S. Seidenberg Department of Psychology University of Wisconsin-Madison November 3, 2011 Society for Language Development Boston

2. [preceding talks by Charles Perfetti and Rebecca Treiman] If the science is so good, why is reading achievement so poor?

4. OECD PISA Reading Results 2009 Wall St. Journal, 8/12/2010

5. NAEP Reading Results 4th grade 34 25 8

6. NAEP Reading Results 8th grade 43 29 3

7. National Assessment of Adult Literacy (2003)

8. 2011 (downloadable from National Academies) (I am one of multiple authors)

9. Why? Many reasons. What are the major ones? Ones about which we could do something. Here are some possibilities.

10. 1. Blame English English spelling is strange. Hard to learn.

11. OECD PISA Reading Results 2009 5. Singapore 6. Canada 7. New Zealand 9. Australia 17. United States

12. Still, people think learning to read English IS hard. English is an outlier even compared to other alphabets. Which have more predictable spelling-sound mappings.

13. English: Deep Welsh: Shallow

14. Italian Spanish German French Finnish Serbian Turkish others Handbook of Orthography and Literacy, Joshi & Aron (Eds.), Erlbaum 2006

15. Is this true? In these studies, “learning to read” = read words (and nonwords) aloud But reading aloud ≠ reading (comprehension)

16. I proved this some years ago. My Bar Mitzvah

17. Bar Mitzvah Languages Shallow: can be read without comprehension Hebrew (vowelled) Italian Welsh Finnish many others. It is also possible to mispronounce words and still know what they mean Non-oral Deaf individuals who read English; Words one knows but can’t pronounce correctly. So reading aloud is not a very good index of “reading”

18. Languages and writing systems: There are tradeoffs Deeper simpler morphology Shallower more complex morphology “Grapholinguistic Equilibrium Hypothesis” (Seidenberg, 2011; downloadable from http://lcnl.wisc.edu) Languages get the writing systems they deserve Serbo-Croatian:couldn’t be like English English: couldn’t be like Serbo-Croatian The “outlier” is actually Italian.

19. 2. How reading is taught NRC report on adult literacy: teaching adults to read is hard available methods are not effective Alternative: do a better job in the first place?

20. Barriers What teachers are taught about reading For some children, what happens in classroom doesn’t matter. For most children, it definitely does.

21. Barriers Failures to identify, help children with reading/language/learning disabilities No routine pediatric or educational screening for dyslexia “they’ll catch up” Some significant percentage of those 90 million low-literacy adults are undiagnosed, untreated dyslexics

22. We could do better. Change is needed, on the education side especially. Very hard to achieve.

23. 3. Poverty Let’s look at the Achievement Gap

24. The "achievement gap" refers to disparities in academic performance between groups of students. Minority groups African American Hispanic Native American Income groups Reading, math, other areas Seen in grades, standardized-test scores, course selection, dropout rates, and college-completion rates.

25. Fortoday, I will mostly focus on white-black gap. Why? large population extensive research societal concern different groups have different circumstances An important issue A complex issue A sensitive issue 30 minutes?

29. How to identify causes? (Does it make sense to even try?)

30. Maybe it is all poverty Poverty is associated with Higher infant mortality rate Atypical brain development Shorter life span Worse health and health care Higher crime rates Lower educational achievement Higher dropout rates Poorer schools with less experienced teachers Poor Reading!!

31. Economists’ Evidence • Data: Early Childhood Longitudinal Study http://nces.ed.gov/ecls • 20,000 children • Interview data, 4 times during K and 1st grade • Many kinds of data about child, family • Black-white differences on reading readiness measures Their finding: a small number of measures account for gap at the start of kindergarten.

32. The factors are: • Socioeconomic status • Number of children’s books in home • Age at kindergarten (months) • Birth weight • Age of mother at time of first birth • WIC (welfare) participant

33. Fourth grade Eighth grade

34. There is an effect of poverty on scores. But thegapis pretty consistent across groups.

35. Economists again

37. Earlier paper: 6 factors account for gap at start of kindergarten. Later paper: the gap gets larger over first 3 years of schooling. The 6 factors do not account for this decline. Nor do any others they could find in the data set.

38. Something else is going on. It contributes to increasing deficit in K-3 It affects kids from different SES It doesn’t show up in the econometric analyses What is it?

39. Language ECLS data set includes information about other languages spoken in home. But not characteristics of spoken language Which vary greatly. For example: vocabulary size (Risley & Hart, and others) lexical quality (Perfetti)

40. What about dialect? Languages have dialects. In the US, main distinction between “Standard” or “Mainstream” American English African American Vernacular English/AAE

41. African American English • Spoken by most African Americans, regardless of SES • 1970s: Research by Labov and then many others documenting properties of AAE • Placed it in a broader linguistic context • Dialect variation is not specific to English or to African Americans.

42. AAE and SAE overlap but also differ • Phonology • Morphology • Syntax • Discourse conventions Among others

43. The depth of immersion in AAE varies • Washington-Craig: “dialect density” • proportion of utterances that exhibit AAE features • Familiarity with standard dialect varies • As does degree of code switching

44. Could dialect differences have an impact on learning to read?

46. Extent of impact under-recognized

47. Attention diverted elsewhere Early empirical studies reported non effects Socio-cultural controversies about intrinsic value, status Emphasis on validity of dialect overshadowed investigation of impact in the educational context

48. Our thinking Need to establish more direct links between dialect and specific aspects of learning to read Drawing on reading research, theory And relevant research on language learning, plasticity, age-related changes

49. Learning spelling-sound relations • Child learns to relate spellings to words in spoken vocabulary • What “phonics” is for • Strongly related to early reading achievement • Difficult for many children • Impaired in dyslexia • Downstream effects on comprehension Reviews: NRP, Snow “Preventing reading difficulties”

50. Pronunciations in AAE and SAE Many words pronounced the same (at phonemic level) Many words pronounced differently Percentage varies with dialect density. Estimates: 30% and higher