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. If the science is so good, why is reading achievement so poor?
[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
Middle-of-the- pack US Performance,
as in previous years

5. NAEP Reading Results 4th grade 34 25 8 67% are basic or above
67% are basic or above
67% are basic or below basic

6. NAEP Reading Results 8th grade 43 29 3 Below basic Basic Proficient
Below basic
Basic
Proficient
advanced

7. About 90 million people who don’t read well enough to
engage fully in society
manage their own healthcare
hold adequately-paying jobs
help educate their own children
and so on
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.
Many alphabets: one letter, one sound
Not english
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
My pronunciation was flawless. I didn’t understand a word I was saying. Hebrew (with vowels) is shallow.

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
That’s why learning to read in Albanian is easy.
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
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. Reading, math, other areas Seen in
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.
Has been going for a long time
Has not succumbed to government efforts dating from War on Poverty (1960s) to NCLB (2000s)

25. For today, 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. (Does it make sense to even try?)
How to identify causes?
(Does it make sense to even try?)
Other measures yield similar picture.

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
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
If you eliminate effects of these factors, you eliminate the b-w difference on achievement tests at start of schooling
SES compositve measure: parental education, parental occupational status, and household in- come.
What do these factors mean? What are the causal mechanisms? All poverty-related.

33. Fourth grade
Also seen in the NAEP data
Eighth grade

34. There is an effect of poverty on scores.
Achievement gap not limited to low=income individuals
But the gap is pretty consistent across groups.

35. Economists again
The reading test includes questions designed to measure basic skills (print familiarity, letter recognition, beginning and ending sounds, rhyming sounds, and word recognition), vocabulary and comprehension, listening and reading comprehension, knowledge of the alphabet, phonetics, and so on.

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.
The reading test includes questions designed to measure basic skills (print familiarity, letter recognition, beginning and ending sounds, rhyming sounds, and word recognition), vocabulary and comprehension, listening and reading comprehension, knowledge of the alphabet, phonetics, and so on.

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
ECLS doesn’t track dialect use

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.
About the same time that Stokoe and then Klima/Bellugi began characterizing properties of ASL.
Had similar impact, in terms of validation

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?

45. Labov recognized potential impact of these various differences on school achievement, particularly reading
Dialect mismatch effects
Why hasn’t more attention been paid?

46. Extent of impact under-recognized
It’s like global warming isn’t on the table anymore either. But, it’s still there.

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
But, it’s like global warming. It’s not in on the table for discussion, but it hasn’t gone away

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
Just like labov’s original research situated AA dialect in a broader linguistic context, we want to situate the impact on learning to read in the broader cognitive science/neuroscience context.

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

51. Major Differences in Pronunciation
Many others.
Craig & Washington, 2004
1. Postvocalic consonant reduction
MORE /mo/
2. Substitutions for /th/
WITH /wif/
3. Devoicing final consonants
HIS /hiss/
4. Consonant cluster reduction
WORLD / werl /
5. Consonant transposition
ASK /aks /
We’re trying to imagine what impact this might have on a beginning reader.
GOLD, FLOOR, and LOW rhyme in AAE

52. SAE learner’s task AAE learner’s task
Learn to map spellings onto existing pronunciations
AAE learner’s task
Learn correspondences between SAE-AAE pronunciations
Learn to map spellings onto SAE pronunciations

53. Teacher: G-O-L-D, that’s “gold”
[child searches spoken language vocabulary for “gold”]
Child: Ohhh, “gole”

54. The main point AAE learner’s task is more complex
But children are assessed against same achievement milestones
Not a problem with the dialect
Not a problem with dialect users
A problem with the situation
Some of the achievement gap is built in.
Other factors aside

55. Our research Behavioral experiments Computational models
Pronouncing words aloud
Children and adults
Computational models
Effects experiential differences
Entrenchment effects
Ways to overcome them

56. Behavioral experiments
African American children, adults
Read words aloud
Contrastive: different pronunciations
bound
old
toast
Non-contrastive: same pronunciation
brush
air
stage
Latencies do not differ in ELP data base.

57. Children (N =22, M age =11.4 years old)
Pronunciations were almost all SAE but both were scored as correct
Multiple pronunciations a problem for early reader.

58. Adults: N = 32, M age = 35.5 y.o.

59. Summary Both children and adults mainly produce SAE pronunciations
Contrastive words  longer latencies (also more errors)
For Ss with greater dialect density (more AAE)

60. Similar to Harm & Seidenberg (1999) dyslexia model
Computational Model
Model allows control of SES
Similar to Harm & Seidenberg (1999) dyslexia model

61. Details Corpus: 1700 words from second grade norms
AAE pronunciations created using 5 most common features of AAE
About half the words are the same in AAE-SAE, and half differ
Pseudo aae. Not exact.

62. Training Pre-reading: Model learns phonological forms, to 90% correct
Then introduce reading task:
Given spelling, generate pronunciation

64. Models learn slowly. Learning based on pretty impoverished input: single tokens of pronunciations, no context, etc.
Plasticity: earlier intervention, before one dialect becomes entrenched

67. Why are these findings potentially controversial?
Language Arts, journal of the National Council of Teachers of English

68. What could be done?

69. A. Nothing One group cannot legislate how another group should speak
But AAE is not the dialect of instruction, business, science etc.

70. B. Accommodation Level the playing field!
Recognize dialect differences
Modify school practices to take it into account
Provide pre-school activities to mitigate effects
Do what they do in other countries that have major dialects?

71. An Indian comparison Sonali Nag (York) Chamarajanagar, Karnataka
Mainstream language is
Kannada
Many tribal dialects
Low status
Low SES
Mainly oral
“Bridge year” pre-K
Emphasis on
exposure to Kannada

72. What Form Could This Take in US?
Preschool activities
To promote knowledge of major features of SAE, awareness of differences between SAE and AAE
To promote ability to code switch
School activities
Continue activities focused on improving code-switching ability
Increase awareness of problem: teachers and students
Provide additional time for initial reading instruction, which takes into account language the child brings to school.

73. Would This Activity Eliminate Effects of Poverty?
No.

74. Would This Increase the Probability of School Success?
It could.
Have to do more research!
People in this room have lots of relevant expertise.
Priming some interest in it.

75. Would This Approach Be Acceptable?
I don’t know. That is a different kind of question.

76. Summary Dialect differences matter
They affect early learning, later performance
There are ways that impact could be mitigated
“AAE itself is not the cause of reading difficulties so much as lack of
knowledge of SAE, given educational and society expectations”

77. Conclusions Reading is deeply dependent on spoken language
Writing systems vs. languages they represent
Basic Skills -- decoding
Comprehension
Language background
Of course, literacy also changes spoken language
But that is a different talk.

78. Thanks for listening.