CONFERENCE REPORT

ORTHOGRAPHY, READING AND DYSLEXIA

A cross-language conference on Orthography, Reading and Dyslexia was held at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, September 18-20, 1978, under the joint sponsorship of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Education, the National Institute of Neurological and Com­municative Disorders and Stroke, the Office of Maternal and Child Health (Health Services Administration), and the John E. Fogarty International Center. Dr. James Kavanagh, Associate Director of the Center for Research for Mothers and Children, NICHD, and Professor Richard Venezky, Unidel Professor of Educa­tional Foundations at the University of Delaware, were co-chairpersons. Central to the Conference interests was the relationship of different writing systems to the languages they represent and their influence on success or failure in learning to read. Participants, who came from 12 countries, including the USA, were asked to address the special nature of the written symbol system used to represent a par­ticular language, especially in regard to the following questions:

1. What is the beginning reader's task? What must the child learn to become a successful reader?

2. What is the rationale for the instructional (including remedial and the­rapeutic) procedures for teaching reading in that language?

3. What research should be conducted to help us understand better the read­ing process and the relationships between orthography and reading?

As in the prior seven conference in the NICHD's "Communicating by Lan­guage" series, this meeting was structured primarily for participant interaction, rather than for addressing an audience. Papers were circulated prior to the meet­ing so that conference time could be spent in discussing major points and relating one's work to other conference presentations.

The Conference was organized around five major areas: (1) orthography and reading in different languages (reports on Chinese, Japanese [Hiragana], Hebrew, Navajo, Finnish, Dutch, Serbo-Croatian, and Russian); (2) processing of ortho­graphy in learning to read; (3) information processing in experienced readers; (4) reading failure; and (5) the design of literacy programs and the methodology of cross-national research.

One issue raised in the meeting was how to define an optimal writing sys-

Cortex (1979) 15, 343-346.

344 Orthography, Reading and Dyslexia

tem. Dr. O. K. Kyostio (University of Oulu, Finland) reported that reading pro­blems still occur in Finland, even though Finnish has the most uniform letter­sound relationship of any widely used alphabetic system. Dr. Takahiko Saka­moto (Noma Institute of Educational Research, Japan) indicated that although the Hiragana syllabic alphabet is highly suited to Japanese phonology, and is easily acquired by young children, reading problems occur in Japan because of the logographic characters (Kanji) which represent the content words in written Ja­panese. In the design of new orthographies, Dr. Joseph Grimes (Cornell Uni­versity) reported that the dominant preference is still for a one phoneme-one symbol system, even though evidence against the efficiency and learnability of such representations exists. Dr. Wayne Holm (Rock Point Community School, Chinle, Arizona) reported for Navajo, for example, that the full marking of Navajo vowel contrasts, including quantity, tone, cavity, and nasalization, is confusing to adult readers. The possibility was raised that what might be an optimal system for a beginning reader might not be optimal for an experienced reader.

A second issue, related to the one just described, was the appropriateness of particular writing systems for representing different types of languages. Several participants pointed out that quite often the selection of an orthography is based upon political, cultural, and social considerations, rather than linguistic ones. Dr. William Wang (University of California-Berkeley), using Chinese as an example, described how, in the areas adjacent to China, many of the languages most similar in structure to Chinese have adopted alphabetic writing systems (e.g., Tibetan, Burmese), while many quite distinct from Chinese (e.g. Korean, Japanese) have borrowed chinese logographs. Both Dr. Grimes and Dr. John Ryan (International Institute for Adult Literacy, Tehran, Iran) stressed the need in designing an or­thography to consider the language of wider communication that speakers of a minority language will eventually need to learn.

A third issue concerned the notion of linguistic awareness and what role it plays in learning to read. Although this subject appeared and reappeared in pre­sentations and discussions, little agreement was reached on its nature or its role in reading acquisition. On one hand, some participants - e.g., Dr. Isabelle Liberman (University of Connecticut) and Dr. Alvin Liberman (Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut) - felt that linguistic awareness is required to read an ortho­graphy that taps more than the surface level of a language. Others, including Dr. Jonathan Baron (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Anatoly Liberman (Uni­versity of Minnesota), suggested caution in assuming that such sophistication is a prerequisite for reading, rather than a result of experience in reading.

Closely related to this concern was the notion of rule learning, and in par­ticular the role of rules as opposed to analgy in reading. Dr. Lee Brooks (Mc Mas­ter University, Hamilton, Ontario) presented examples of training tasks in which adults failed to acquire letter-sound patterns in an artificial orthography, yet still abstracted some features to facilitate transfer beyond the training items. Drs. Georgije Lukatela (University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia) and Michael Turvey (University of Connecticut) discussed a variety of different experiments with Ser­bo-Croatian readers, in which the researchers tried to assess the degree of inter­ference created by the two scripts (Cyrillic and Roman) which are used in Yu­goslavia. They found that in general, the patterns which are generalized from the script learned first dominate reading habits into adulthood, even though the se­cond script is usually learned within a year of the first.

Information processing in competent reading, a topic which links linguistic

Orthography, Reading and Dyslexia 345

awareness and rule learning, was discussed in several presentations. Dr. Dominic Massaro (University of Wisconsin) presented recent empirical support for the view that orthographic structure serves primarily to aid letter identification when visual information is incomplete, but does not facilitate recognition of the features of the letters themselves. Dr. Ovid Tzeng (University of California-Riverside) re­ported from his own studies with Chinese characters that phonological mediation is not necessary for lexical access, but is utilized to facilitate retention in short-term memory. These results are similar to what some researchers report for processing of alphabetic script. However, the Serbo-Croatian studies mentioned above tend to support the opposite view. Nevertheless, the three sets of studies reported here demonstrate that information processing paradigms are directly applicable to cross-language comparisons of reading processes.

Another set of papers discussed the nature of spelling ability and its re­lationship to reading ability. Both Dr. Uta Frith (MRC Developmental Psycho­logy Unit, London) and Dr. Linnea Ehri (University of California-Davis) reported studies on spelling that indicate the visual component in spelling may be more dominant than a rule-derived phonological component. Dr. Dina Feitelson (Uni­versity of Haifa, Israel) pointed out that in Israel, where many citizens are not native speakers of Hebrew, a fully-marked Hebrew script helps teach proper pronunciation. For Navajo, Dr. Holm speculated that a common spelling system would serve "as an arbiter between idiolectal variations."

Another issue that commanded considerable attention was the nature of reading failure and in particular the notion of dyslexia. The arbitrariness of current definitions of dyslexia was addressed by Dr. Renate Valtin (Pudagogische Hochschule, Berlin, West Germany), who reported on her own and other German studies of this topic. Carefully controlled studies have shown no predominance of letter or word reversals in dyslexic readers. Dr. Frank Vellutino (Albany Medi­cal College, Albany, New York) reviewed considerable evidence for eliminating visual deficits as a major cause of extreme reading problems. Instead, he claims, reading problems lead to visual inefficiencies resulting from a failure to utilize verbal regularities to facilitiate processing of textual material, a view that relates to the issue of linguistic awareness discussed earlier.

Adapting instruction to the peculiarities of a language and its script was discussed by a few speakers, but was not thoroughly examined. Dr. Feitelson re­ported on studies of instructional methodology used to teach Hebrew script. In particular, it was found that for maximal learning, letters with the same sound should be presented together, but letters with similar shapes or similar sounds be presented fairly far apart in an instructional sequence. Dr. Vincent van Heuven (University of Leiden, The Netherlands) reported on a study in Holland that attempted to discover the degree of difficulty for oral blending produced by different monosyllabic syllable structures. Questions of methodology in investigat­ing instruction were also discussed. Dr. Eve Malmquist (University of Linkoping, Sweden) presented a proposal for a large-scale comparison of reading across cultures.

Many participants felt, however, that such problems as scaling the complexity (or regularity) of orthographies need to be resolved before comparative studies on initial reading can be done profitably. Similarly, between-;ubjects designs in comparing an established orthography with variations upon it were felt to be inadvisable, although no acceptable alternatives to such comparisons were sug­gested.

346 Orthography, Reading and Dyslexia

More work is needed on defining theoretical relationships between differ­ent wtlt1ng systems and the languages they represent, and then in exploring the degree to which these relationships represent demonstrable habits of competent readers. Whether or not use of analogy can be distinguished from use of rules in translating from spelling to sound also needs serious consideration, as do the possible alternatives to hard-core rules that readers might employ. For exploring instructional methodology, new investigative procedures may be required to achieve "ecological validity." The typical laboratory approaches, particularly those using training-transfer techniques in relatively brief sessions, have not been capa­ble of mirroring sustained learning in an ongoing class.

Finally, comparisons across languages of stage-by-stage processing during reading should be pursued with a variety of different writing systems. Many of the equivocal results emerging from the last ten years of word recognition studies in this country might be explained through the use of information processing paradigms with different types of writing systems.

These approaches to the analysis of reading processes also might be applied to the diagnosis of severely retarded readers, in an attempt to identify which processing deficits are peculiar to specific writing systems and which are not.

Richard L. Venezky, Ph.D., and James F. Kavanagh, Ph.D. -