Spelfabet

Literacy boosts language

Washington DC’s amazing Planet Word Museum has a great YouTube channel which includes a lecture called Eyes on Reading: Dr. Stanislas Dehaene with Emily Hanford about how learning to read changes the brain. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the many kids I’ve known with whose language test scores vastly improved after they learnt to read and write, so I sat up and paid close attention when Dr. Dehaene said (starting at 16.15 on the video clock):

“…because you’ve learned to read, you are processing spoken language better. You are hearing the phonemes better and you are able to do phonological awareness tasks, you’re able to move phonemes around in your mind, you’re able to play with phonemes, and we found that there is almost a doubling of the brain activity for spoken language as a function of how good a reader you are, as a function of reading score. So that’s a huge transformation. We don’t fully know at the cellular level what it means, but there is a huge enhancement of responses in this area. We also found that the connection between these systems, if we look just at the anatomy of the connections of the brain with diffusion imaging, was reinforced “.

Matthew Effects and Spiral Causality

We’ve known since Keith Stanovich’s classic 1986 Matthew Effects article that reading boosts both language and cognitive skills. He explains this here:

Conversely, failing to learn to read has a negative impact on language and cognitive skills, and other negative knock-on effects, as Stanovich wrote:

“Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioral, and motivational consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and inhibit performance on many academic tasks. In short, as reading develops, other cognitive processes linked to it track the level of reading skill. Knowledge bases that are in reciprocal relationships with reading are also inhibited from further development. The longer this developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized the deficits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition and behavior. Or, to put it more simply – and more sadly – in the words of a tearful nine-year-old, already falling frustratingly behind his peers in reading progress, “Reading affects everything you do.” (p390)

In 2011, Dutch researchers Suzanne Mol and Adriana Bus published To Read or Not To Read: A Meta-Analysis of Print Exposure from Infancy to Early Adulthood, in which they found:

“Print exposure explains 12% of the variance in preschoolers’ and kindergartners’ oral language skills,13% in primary school, 19% in middle school, 30% in high school, and 34% at undergraduate and graduate level…Although these outcomes do not permit conclusions about causality, the pattern of findings as well as a qualitative review of longitudinal studies suggests that spiral causality is plausible.”

Being literate helps us remember spoken words

In 2022 I was surprised by radio reports of a new, nationalist Italian Prime Minister with an Irish-sounding name: Georgia Maloney. OK, Italy and Ireland are both in the EU, but, mi scusi? Google to the rescue. Giorgia Meloni. Facepalm. I’d applied the wrong orthographic skeletons – ideas we form about a word’s spelling from its pronunciation. They’re what we correct/clarify when we hear an unfamiliar name, ask ‘how do you spell that?’, then don’t write it down. We’re just trying to mentally store a high-quality lexical representation (sounds, word structure, meaning and spelling).

Generating orthographic skeletons is linked to better word recall (see last year’s delightfully-titled article Déjà-lu: When Orthographic Representations are Generated in the Absence of Orthography), just as oral vocabulary knowledge boosts retention of written words (see other non-paywalled articles about this here, here, here and here). Words are learnt more easily, even by dyslexic children, when presented in both spoken and printed form. Spellings help us symbolise and store sounds/word parts in memory. Other research on this Orthographic Facilitation process can be found here, here and here.

We all know strong oral language is the foundation of strong literacy skills, but language and literacy intertwine across the lifespan in a reciprocal way, so that becoming literate boosts oral language skills, especially vocabulary. US education, cognitive science and fairness blogger Natalie Wexler’s recent post “Want children to be good speakers? Teach them to write” argues that writing instruction also improves comprehension and the ability to use formal spoken language. All of us at Spelfabet are about to do SRSD training, as research suggests their approach to writing also has positive spinoffs for other aspects of communication and wellbeing.

New NDIS guidelines

Australia’s new National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) guidelines say supports related to school education are not funded by the NDIS. Having been in local government, I find cost-shifting maddening, so I agree that every cent of NDIS funding should be spent helping people with disabilities to become more independent, find work, study and have greater choice and control over their lives.

Ideally, schools should be able to teach all children with disabilities who can understand and use language to read and write. As well as this being great for the kids, it would save the NDIS a lot of money helping participants overcome consequences of poor literacy, like not being able to read signage, food labels, recipes, shopping lists, timetables, text messages etc., let alone study or find work.

Some children with disabilities have major difficulties with phonological processing, memory, speech, language, attention, perspective-taking, restricted interests, sensory overload, motor planning and/or anxiety, which interfere with learning to read and write. Even if they have high-quality classroom teaching and small group intervention in their first three years of schooling, they still fall behind their peers. Their disabilities require specialised, individualised intervention not always available in schools to learn to read and write, and thus improve their language and life prospects generally. The longer this intervention is postponed, the more difficult and expensive it becomes.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist