I Can Hear You Whisper (28 page)

A
sk an average four-year-old to tell you the difference between “cat” and “hat,” and he will probably tell you that one is an animal you pet and the other is something you put on your head. Ask the same question when he's five, and you might hear that “cat” starts with a “k” sound and “hat” with a breathy “hu” sound. Something profound has occurred. Once a child understands that there's a relationship between the spoken words “cat” and “hat” that has nothing to do with their meanings and everything to do with how they sound, he is launched on the challenging obstacle course of learning to read. All along the way, he must master successive, compounding skills until he soars to the finish line ready to read fluently, or is left behind mired in the mud.

That first hurdle, phonological awareness, requires recognizing that spoken words are made of parts. For those who've completed the obstacle course, that no longer seems like such a big deal. Good adult readers know it so intuitively and act on it so gracefully that we often don't remember what a leap the idea required. We don't go to school to learn to talk, because spoken language, for the hearing, comes naturally. That doesn't mean it's easy, just that it's mostly unconscious. “Our brains know that there are separate phonemes and syllables within words,” says Ken Pugh, a cognitive psychologist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. We don't need to be aware of that fact to acquire speech. “We're wired to talk and listen and chew gum at the same time if you will.” Reading, on the other hand, as Steven Pinker has put it, “is
an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.” It is also a relatively recent cultural invention that requires a child to actively consider and come to some understanding about how language works. That process begins with phonological awareness.

I had to make the leap all over again when Alex started to learn to read. Until then, I hadn't had to think much about the way that spoken language underpins written language or that the term “phonological awareness” refers to speech rather than print. It is the ability to hear that “big” has one syllable and “bigger” has two, that “big” and “ball” begin with the same sound, that “big” and “pig” rhyme, or finally, at the most sophisticated level, that “big” consists of three sounds: “b-i-g.” In my ignorance, I was apparently not alone. “People hear this term all the time, parents in particular, but they still don't quite understand,” says Haskins scientist Stephen Frost. “Many educators as well don't get it.”

Haskins Laboratories, a nonprofit research institute affiliated with Yale and the University of Connecticut, studies the science of the spoken and written word. It might be considered
a church of phonological awareness. Certainly, no group of researchers has done more to further the mission of understanding the connections between spoken language and reading—or in the case of people with reading disabilities or hearing loss, the misconnections. They have shown not only how important phonology is for typically developing children but also that it is the leading cause of reading problems. Their work has such obvious implications outside of the laboratory that Haskins scientists spend a good amount of time spreading the word. Donald Shankweiler, the pioneering reading researcher from whom I borrowed the lines about the cat and the hat and the four-year-old and the five-year-old, likes to tell his colleagues stories of talking to rooms full of educators and suddenly seeing them begin to nod their heads when they have seen the light.

Shankweiler himself saw the light at Haskins in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When he and his longtime collaborator Isabelle Liberman began to test explanations for reading problems, there was a pretty strongly held view that reading was visual and that reading disability was probably visual as well. “
Reversals of letters and words were still considered to be the hallmark of dyslexia,” wrote Shankweiler. Treatments included eye exercises and motor patterning. Shankweiler and Liberman approached the subject differently. “Because writing transcribes language, it seemed natural to ask how reading builds on the foundations of the child's development of primary language,” wrote Shankweiler. It was especially natural at Haskins, which, under the direction of Isabelle's husband, Alvin Liberman, already specialized in speech science and was a breeding ground for new ideas. Al Liberman regularly walked the halls asking, “
Made any discoveries today?”

In order to read an alphabetic language like English or Spanish, children need to master the alphabetic principle that letters correspond to speech sounds or phonemes. That much was clear. A phoneme is the smallest unit of a word that has a distinct sound and, depending on dialect, there are about forty in English, such as the “c” in “cat” or the “sh” at the end of “push.” The ancient Greeks are credited with being the first phoneticians and “doggedly perfecting the correspondence between letters and all known sounds,” wrote Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
. The discovery that “
the entire speech stream of oral language could be analyzed and systematically segmented into individual sounds,” she goes on to note, “is not an obvious perception for anyone, in any era. . . . [Yet] the great breakthrough by the inventors of the Greek alphabet . . . happens unconsciously in the life of every child who learns to read.”

At Haskins, the Libermans, Shankweiler, and another scientist named Ignatius Mattingly began to debate how it was that children arrived at the alphabetic principle, since the alphabet did not actually directly correspond to the sounds of speech. They came up with the idea of phonological awareness as a preliminary step. No one had really thought to look for such a thing before. In their earliest studies, they found that many preschool children have made a start on phonology—they are aware of syllables—but very few can separate out a phoneme. In the decades of research that followed at Haskins and elsewhere, it has been clearly established among other things that
preschool oral language skills are predictive of fourth-grade comprehension skills, that
how the brain reacts to speech sounds on the first day of school has big implications for what that child has to do to learn, and that more specifically, the
location of a kindergartner's brain response to sound is correlated with how many words she will read per minute in second and fourth grades. Furthermore, says Usha Goswami, the Cambridge researcher who discussed Dr. Seuss with me, “There's now twenty to thirty years of research across many different languages which shows that individual differences in brains that are good at reading and brains that struggle to read are really related to sound structure.”

Ken Pugh has been doing some of that research at Haskins for more than twenty years and is the current president of the laboratories. Amiable and clean-cut, he has the look of a softhearted New York City beat cop from an earlier era. Nice as he is, he has no patience for those who have yet to get the message. “It still continues to be the case that many people teach reading in a non-evidence-based way,” he says. “The work here on phonological awareness, that's the evidence.” He is not the only one who thinks so. In 2000, a
National Reading Panel funded primarily by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development summarized fifty years of accumulated evidence to arrive at five principles for teaching reading. The first is that phonologic awareness is a precursor. The second is the alphabetic principle, or phonics, “the idea that those units can be represented systematically by squiggles,” says Pugh. “You can't build a building without a basement; phonics is the basement.” Third is building vocabulary, because you also can't have a good reading system without a good vocabulary. Fourth is strategies for comprehension that kick in as kids go beyond decoding and gain fluency. The fifth and final principle, “under-appreciated but important,” says Pugh, is motivation, which encompasses cognitive skills like attention—Helen Neville's “force multiplier”—and working memory and planning, all of which contribute to reading outcomes. This last also takes into account the plain old desire to read, a powerful aid in the process since the relationship between reading and all of these elements is reciprocal: Reading both requires and builds phonological awareness, vocabulary, and background knowledge in ways that mean, as one expert wrote, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

It took the National Reading Panel report to put an end to an unfortunate era known as the reading wars, a decade or two in which supporters of phonics did battle with those who believed in a “whole language” approach. “The idea [behind whole language] is that reading is as natural as anything else and you'll pick up what you need, so don't kill and drill on phonics—let's tell kids to use text to guess what's coming next,” says Pugh. “This is fundamentally inconsistent with the data. If kids are typically developing and you put them in whole-language approaches, they're not going to do as well, but they may just squeak by because they'll pick up on it on their own. But if kids are at risk for reading problems and if phonological awareness and that kind of thing doesn't come free, you are essentially creating what [we] call curriculum casualties. It's criminal.” The
state of California is a case in point. In 1987, it adopted a curriculum that favored whole language over basic decoding skills. By 1993 and 1994, three out of four children in the state were reading below grade-level averages. Soon most schools had switched back to emphasizing letter-sound correspondence, exactly as later recommended by the National Reading Panel. Today, although a few proponents of whole language persist in their cause in the United States (with many more in other countries), the current reading debate centers on how best to teach the principles in the national report and help children master what reading expert Maryanne Wolf calls the three code-cracking capacities: phonological, orthographic, and semantic.

The goal is fluency, an ability to read quickly and understand, and to fall back on decoding only for difficult, unfamiliar words like “pericardium” or “obliterative.” Fluency affords an opportunity to go beyond the text, and the luxury of time to think. All of which you need, as Wolf points out, to appreciate when you read
Charlotte's Web
not only what might have happened to Wilbur had Charlotte not intervened but also how sophisticated the spider's reasoning really was.

How best to achieve fluency using the five principles is a discussion that is increasingly
informed by neuroscience. Over the past fifteen years, Pugh and others have used the full complement of imaging techniques to better understand how reading circuits are built in the brain, what happens when they go awry, and how intervention and learning can help. “A skilled adult reader can decode words, pull them off the page, in what we estimate to be about 250 milliseconds. That ain't a lot of time,” says Pugh. “If you can do that effortlessly and automatically, then you can read sentences and put your energy and your thought into the syntax and the pragmatics and understand the story. But if pulling each word off the page takes your whole soul and a lot of time—this is what happens in dyslexia—then by the time you get to the end of the sentence, you tend to forget the beginning and you end up with what appears to be problems of comprehension. . . . If you can't read the words fast enough, it's hard to have everything in short-term memory so that you can operate on what the story is about.”

The gold standard for diagnosing reading problems is nonsense—literally. The same skilled reader who took 250 milliseconds to process a word will take another 250 milliseconds to say it out loud. A non-word like “clart” or “tove,” which by definition the reader won't have seen before, will take only an additional fifty milliseconds. “Why does that matter?” asks Pugh. “Because being a skilled reader means that you've developed these mappings between letters and sounds so well that you can essentially decode anything like a machine. And you can decode things you've never seen almost as fast as things you've seen a zillion times.” If children are struggling, whether they hear or don't hear, they are slow, labored, and error-prone on real words and are “just horribly challenged by nonsense words,” says Pugh.

All of this is visible in the brain. Neural activity shifts and concentrates as children learn. The beginning reader looking at a word will use more of the brain in both hemispheres and from front to back—the occipital lobes that control vision, the temporal and parietal lobes that are essential for language, and the frontal lobe that controls executive processes. Over time, the activity coalesces primarily in the left hemisphere, using less of the frontal lobe (anything automatic requires less thinking) and less of the right hemisphere (because language networks have become more fully engaged). Fluency has a signature as clear as John Hancock's—a concentrated response in the perisylvian cortex, which runs along the temporal, parietal, and frontal axis, home to language processing areas.

One of several recent studies that captured this process of change was done
at the University of Oregon and involved eighteen kindergartners in an fMRI scanner. The children watched a series of images flash for less than two seconds at a time. Some were lowercase letters such as “k” or “c.” Some were false fonts that looked like a letter but weren't (for example, a “c” flipped to open to the left and squared off just a touch). If the same letter or false font flashed twice in a row, the child had to press a button. Those who were considered at-risk for reading showed no difference in response to letters or false fonts. But those who appeared to be on track showed slightly more brain activity in left-hemisphere areas when looking at letters. The false fonts activated more of the visual system that corresponds with object recognition and fewer language areas. After eight weeks of school and an additional thirty-minute reading intervention daily for the at-risk group, the brains of both sets of children had changed. The response in those who began on track had matured to look more like adult readers. Those who had been at-risk looked more like their peers who'd begun ahead of them.