C o g n i t i v e F a c t o r s in D y s l e x i a

John Downing, Ph.D.* University of Victoria

The term "dyslexia" is used here in its original functional sense, that is, to denote disturbance in the functioning of reading skill. Although it is accepted that there may be isomorphism of neurologi- cal processes and manifest behavior in reading, a necessary causal connection between neurological handicap and dyslexia is not as- sumed. Nor is it denied. This article is concerned with a different issue--how reading disorders are caused by problems of cognition, and what measures may be appropriate in prevention and treatment.

Cognition in Reading

Until just over 100 years ago the reading of written language was socially restricted. Only a tiny elite class of the populat ion had the oppor tuni ty to learn to read. Obviously, it is genetically impossible that any specific organ or area of the brain could have evolved for the reading process. Reading and writing and learning these skills must employ processes in the nervous system that are already avail- able for more general functioning.

A peculiar difficulty in learning to read is that, unlike many other skills, it is no t possible for the nonreader to imitate the actions of the reader. For example, the child cannot see exactly what the reader is doing, nor is it clear why the reader does what he does. This obscuri ty of action and purpose causes the young child to enter the first stage of the learning-to-read process in a state of cognitive confusion in regard to the purpose and mechanism of reading. The beginner has great difficulty in understanding what reading is for and what actions he must learn. The linguistic concepts on which the task

* Dr. Downing is Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Vic- toria, British Columbia, Canada.

Child Psychiatry and Human Development Vol. 4(2), Winter 1973 115

116 Child Psychiatry and Human Development

of learning to read depends also are not known to the young child. Hence, the normal condition of the beginning reader is cognitive confusion.

Thus the fundamental basis of learning to read would seem to be the movement from this state of cognitive confusion to one of increasing cognitive clarity. The learning-to-read process, therefore, is a problem-solving process, in which the child gradually acquires more and more of the necessary linguistic concepts, and an increasing understanding of the purpose and mechanism of the reading act. Although the importance of this development of cognitive clarity is most apparent in the initial stages of literacy acquisition, cognitive clarity probably continues to develop throughout all the later stages of education as new abstract concepts of language are learned.

In a recent survey of reading in 14 different countries [1] considerable evidence was found for the importance of cognitive clarity or confusion in success or failure, respectively, in l~arning to read. The beginner in reading in any culture or any language is in the situation illustrated in figure 1. He is assailed at once from three directions, and often the inputs f rom them are in conflict with each other. In this cross-cultural survey three extreme examples of cogni- tive confusion on a wide scale were noted.

In the first two of these the language of literacy was different f rom the language of oracy. Macnamara [2] investigated the effects

LINGUISTIC STIMULI

(a) Past and current experiences of spoken language

(b) Current experiences of written language

COGNITIVE PROCESSES

OF THE LITERACY LEARNER

EXPECTATIONS OF LITERACY

�9 RESPONSES APPROPRIATE IN THE CULTURE

T EXTRANEOUS

FACTORS

(a) Within the individual e.g., emotional problems, etc.

(b) In the environment e.g., kind of schooling

FIGURE 1 : The learning-to-read process.

John Downing 117

of teaching literacy in Irish to children whose mother tongue is English. He found that "native-speakers of English in Ireland who have spent 42 percent of their school time learning Irish do not achieve the same standard in written English as British children who have not learned a second language (estimated difference in standard, 17 months of English age). Neither do they achieve the same stan- dard in written Irish as native speakers of Irish (estimated difference, 16 months of Irish age)." In comparison with both groups who were learning how their own oracy was related to literacy, the children who were forced to learn literacy in relation to a different spoken language to their own were nearly 11,~ years delayed in their develop- ment of literacy skills. These results represent a massive effect of a gross source of cognitive confusion.

A similar conclusion is indicated by the research of Modiano [3] , who studied the outcome of teaching literacy in Spanish to children in Mexico whose mother tongue was an Indian language. Modiano's research method was experimental. One of her t reatment groups was taught to read in the conventional manner--in the official (Spanish) language only. A second group, however, began to learn to read in its own Indian language and by the second year of school was trans- ferred to reading in Spanish. This second group was significantly superior, not only at the beginning, but later in its Spanish reading. Therefore, Modiano concluded: "The youngsters of linguistic minor- ities learn to read with greater comprehension in the national lan- guage when they first learn to read in their mother tongue than when they receive all their reading instruction in the national language." Her experiment indicates the hygienic effect of avoiding gross haz- ards of cognitive confusion such as conflicts be tween the language of literacy and the first language of oracy.

The third example is helpful to our understanding of this prob- lem because it extends it to the area of dialect conflicts. Osterberg [4] investigated the effect of teaching literacy to children in a dialect different from their own. Osterberg's sample of children all spoke as their mother tongue the Pite~ dialect of Swedish. His control group was taught to read in the usual way in standard Swedish, but his experimental group had the same methods and materials taught and written in the Pite~ dialect. The experimental group surpassed the control group not only during the initial dialect stage bu t also later when they transferred to literacy in standard Swedish. Thus, avoiding a source of cognitive confusion in the conflict between the dialect of literacy and the dialect of oracy is a form of mental hygiene too.

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Other Cognitive Hazards

The examples referred to above are extreme cases that illustrate how cognitive confusion occurs in normal children in very hazardous cultural or linguistic environments. But it must no t be thought that cognitive confusion occurs only in such bizarre circumstances. There are many other potential hazards in the development of cognitive clarity in learning how to read and how to write. Even if the language of the t ex tbook and the language of the child are both ostensibly "standard," for instance, there may be a linguistic conflict. Often beginners' books contain such constructions as " 'Up the hill went Jack, ' said the old man," whereas the language of the child's past experience has been "The old man said, ' Jack went up the hill.' " Such minor discrepancies can accrue sufficiently to raise the thresh- old of confusion beyond the child's level of tolerance in the crucial initial stage of orientation to writ ten language.

Another area of research shows how cognitive confusion is of much more general importance. In recent years a number of investi- gations have revealed the young child's problem of handling basic linguistic concepts used in talking and thinking about reading and how to do it.

Reid's [5] focused interviews with five-year-olds beginning school in Scotland discovered that such young children usually lack two basic types of concept. Firstly, they do not understand the functions of reading and writing. This is a confirmation of an earlier finding by Vygotsky [6] . Secondly, they do not have such linguistic concepts as word, phoneme, letter, number, and so on. These results have been confirmed in several other subsequent studies [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] . All show that one source of cognitive confusion in the initial stage of learning to read is the child's lack of basic concepts of language. It is very difficult to understand reading instruction when one does not possess the concepts that he is supposed to use in learning the skill.

Francis' research [9] is particularly revealing. She conducted a series of tests of the language concepts, vocabulary, and reading achievement of boys and girls in an industrial city in the north of England. She noted that, when they talked about language: " T h e outstanding feature was the almost universal reference to spelling, reading and writing. Almost no replies indicated an awareness of the use of words or sentences in the spoken language." Also: " I t was as though the children had never thought to analyse speech, but in learning to read had been forced to recognize units and sub-divisions.

John Downing 119

The use of words like letter, word and sentence in teaching was no t so much a direct aid to instruction but a challenge to find their meaning." One cannot help but wonder how many children are failing in reading because they are being thrown unprepared into a deep sea of undefined linguistic concepts.

A longitudinal s tudy [13] fills out the description of the devel- opment of cognitive clarity in learning to read. Tests o f the attain- ment of the concepts word and phoneme were used to categorize young beginners into superior, intermediate, and slow groups. The bet ter their grading was on the concept tests, the more progress they made toward cognitive clarity in other observed respects: (a) understanding the communicat ion function of writ ten language; (b) conceptualizing writing as symbolic; (c) understanding the proc- esses of decoding and encoding; and (d) developing other language concepts and the corresponding technical terminology.

Cognitive Confusion in Dyslexia

The recent research reviewed in the sections above vindicates an earlier finding by Vernon [14] which deserves greater at tention than it has received hitherto. From her comprehensive survey of the research on causes of reading disability, she concluded: "Thus the fundamental and basic characteristic of reading disability appears to be cognitive confusion." The child who has failed in reading is "hopelessly uncertain and confused as to why certain successions of printed letters should correspond to certain phonetic sounds in words." Vernon stressed that the reading disabled child "does no t seem to understand why" written language is what it is. The most common deficit is not one of audi tory discrimination or visual perception, for example. As Serafica and Sigel [15] have shown, disabled readers can be superior to normal readers in visual discrimi- nation, for instance. The problem for the disabled reader is no t so much that he cannot hear phonemes or see letters, bu t that he is unable to conceptualize such categories as phoneme and grapheme and unable to reason about their relationships.

In terms of mental hygiene, very much more time and care needs to be taken in avoiding cognitive hazards in the learning-to-read process. In the t reatment of reading disability also it would seem appropriate to look more closely at the dyslexic's confused notions about the functions and nature of the processes of spoken and written language and how these are related logically.

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References

1. Downing J: Comparative Reading. New York, Macmillan, 1973. 2. Macnamara J: Bilingualism and Primary Education. Edinburgh, Ediriburgh

University Press, 1966. 3. Modiano N: National or mother language in beginning reading: A compara-

tive study. Res Teaching Eng 2:32-43, 1968, 4. Osterberg T: Bilingualism and the First School Language. Ume~, Sweden:

V'fisterbottens Tryckeri, 1961. 5. Reid JF: Learning to think about reading. Ed. Res 9:56-62 , 1966. 6. Vygotsky LS: Thought and Language. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 1962. 7. Downing J: Children's concepts of language in learning to read. Ed Res

12:106-12, 1970. 8. Downing J, Oliver P: The child's conception of "a word." Reading Res Q,

1973, in press. 9. Francis H: Children's experience of reading and notions of units in language.

Brit J Ed Psychol 43:17-23 , 1973. 10. Kingston AJ, Weaver WW, Figa LE: Experiments in children's perceptions of

words and word boundaries. In FP Greene (Ed), Investigations Relating to Mature Reading. Milwaukee, National Reading Conference, Inc. 1972.

11. Lansdown R, Davis V: The language of reading and the ESN child. Reading 6:21-24, 1972.

12. Meltzer NS, Herse R: The boundaries of written words as seen by first graders. J Reading Behav 1 :3 -14 , 1969.

13. Downing J: Children's developing concepts of spoken and written language. J Reading Behav 4:1-19 , 1972.

14. Vernon MD: Backwardness in Reading. London, Cambridge University Press, 1957.

15. Serafica FC, Sigel IE: Styles of categorization and reading disability. J Reading Behav 2:105-15, 1970.