Cognitive Science 301

Applied Cognitive Science and Education
Fall 2006

Reading (Chapter 9, Levine and Reed)

• Successful reading is a combination of developmental/age-dependent milestones, competency in individual neurodevelopmental constructs, and integration of these components.

Developmental States of Reading (Chall's Model) (Table 9-1, p 301)

• Pre-reading Stage ( 6mos - 5 yrs of age)
  • acquiring a sense of language (books, knowing that the written word is important)
  • growing awareness of the alphabet
  • pseudo-reading (making up stories when looking at a book, pretending to read)
  • rhyming
• Initial reading & decoding (ages 5-7, grades K, 1, 2)
  • phoneme-grapheme association awareness
  • increasing vocabulary
  • identification of individual words, separations between words, number of syllables within words
  • beginning of "word-by-word" reading
• Confirmation, fluency and ungluing from the print (ages 7-8, grades 2, 3)
  • increasing vocabulary
  • increasing fluency
  • developing word analysis skills (suffixes, prefixes, word roots, syllables)
  • content is not sophisticated
  • starting to use contextual cues
• Reading for learning the new (ages 9-14, grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
  • content area reading and its specialized vocabulary
  • increasing capability for silent reading
  • increasing vocabulary, especially words not used in everyday conversation
  • increasing need for comprehension
  • increasing demand for recall and summarization after reading
  • increasing reading rate and efficiency
• Multiple Viewpoints (ages 14-17, high school)
  • increased volume of reading
  • skills needed for compare and contrasting information
  • need for increased comprehension and analysis
  • increased complexity of sentence structure and ideas
  • interpretation of literary forms and figures of speech
• Construction and reconstruction (ages 18+, college and beyond)
  • detailed analysis, synthesis, judgment
  • creation of one's own views after reading different sources
  • skimming
  • analysis of when to skim and when to read for details

Reading Words

• This is the "construction of meaning from text" p 304
  • this depends on background knowledge
  • this also depends on the decoding and analysis skills of the reader
• Elements in "construction of meaning from text:
  • overall visual configuration of letters in a word
  • orthographic features of words (order of letters)
  • phonological features (sounds)
  • semantic features (meaning of the words)
  • syntax/grammar
  • lexical access (refers to remembering all of the above features)
• Access to words
  • Sight vocabulary
    • identification not needing decoding - efficient fluency
    • the more one reads the greater the sight vocabulary library
  • Word analysis (decoding, analyzing components of unfamiliar words and their context)
    • Phonologic word analysis
      • dividing words into their phonemes and associating with specific graphemes and morphemes
      • segmenting word skills
        • seeing the overall configuration of the word, the individual letters, and the order of letters within that word
        • requires the following skills: visual attention, memory, visual-spatial ability, visual discrimination
        • associating sounds with the configuration of letters (paired association/memory and retrieval)
        • need fluency in these skills to be a fluent reader
        • processing deficits [sensory (visual/written and auditory/spoken), attention, memory, temporal-sequential analysis, fluency]
          • e.g., auditory discrimination
          • requires focusing both eyes on letters within a word and then quickly moving both together to refocus on the next word, etc. (functional reading, eye-teaming)
        • comparison with previously heard or read words, understanding context (long-term memory)
    • Structural or morphologic word analysis
      • is used most commonly after the ages or 8 or 9 with familiar words
      • recognition of morphemes (smallest meaningful units of language)
        • free and bound morphemes
      • recognition of syllables, compound words
      • knowledge of word roots
    • Contextual word analysis
      • what does the word mean in the sentence, the previous and next sentence, the paragraph, the story?
      • See p 307 for Miller's list of clues that are used to determine context.
        • experience clues: prior knowledge
        • association clues: relationship of an unknown word to a similar known word in the sentence or paragraph
        • synonym clues: may be within the same or adjacent sentences
        • summary clues: meaning is known from the meaning of adjacent sentences or the meaning of the paragraph
        • comparison or contrast clues within the context of the sentence (see examples on p 308)
        • previous contact clues: comparison of similar word with a known word (not in the passage)
• The whole language approach (context)
• The phonological processing approach (segmentation analysis)
• Know how each of the following neurodevelopmental constructs impacts reading words (pp 308-312)
  • attention
  • visual processing weaknesses
  • language disabilities (re: linguistic knowledge: phonology, morphology, semantics, syntactic, metalinguistic awareness problems)
  • memory deficiencies
    • phonological associative memory (paired association)
    • sequential memory
    • semantic encoding
    • naming deficiencies (rapid automatic retrieval/naming)
    • active working memory
  • higher order cognitive weaknesses