Reading: Nature with Nurture

Peter Dunn-Rankin

Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education, University of Hawaii

Peter Dunn-Rankin

Abstract:

Studies by Zhang, Khul, etal. (2006) argue for a critical period in a young child’s life when they make a neural commitment to embrace the ambient language. This development period ranges from birth to one and half years of age. The inability of adults to effectively emulate or discriminate sounds not heard as a child (Native Japanese have difficulty with English r and l) is significant. Recently Caspi, etal. (2007) have shown that babies, with a specific gene (Nature), who are breastfeed (Nurture) can enhance their WISC score to a large degree (almost half a SD). Analogously all infants are born with the ability to discriminate any language sounds (Nature). If they are provided a functional language environment within a rewarding social context and during a critical time period (Nurture) then later language facility may be greatly enhanced. This paper is an argument for reading to children before they reach one and half years of age.

Early Discrimination

Figure 1: My mother read to her three sons.

1

Reading to children has long been approved as beneficial to their academic success. “I read to my children and they have done well in school.” Or “My mother read to me and my brothers. I read to my children. My children read to their children and they have all done well in school”.

Such a rationale, however, is largely anecdotal. The evidence has been circumstantial. Arguments for the success of reading to children could also be based on socio-economic status, inherited abilities, parental interest, etc. Now, however, the argument of reading to very young children can be augmented on more formidable grounds.

The legacy of Peter Jusczyk (2005) argues objectively for infant’s very early acquisition of syllable perception. Using the HAS* (High Amplitude Sucking) techniques, Jusczyk and his students showed that infants can discriminate essentially all the sound contrasts that any languages use. There are approximately 6800 different languages in the world. For example, infants as young as 4 weeks old can discriminate vowel contrasts such as /u/ versus /i/ and /i/ versus /a/ (Jusczyk, etal., 1999) and consonant contrasts such as /p/ versus /b/ and /d/ versus /g/ (for a summary, see Aslin, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1998) Using HT (Head Turning) methodology infants (9 months of age) were found to be sensitive to the prosody of the language, i.e., pauses and stress placement. They also showed that infants were aware of the statistical properties of the language, i.e., word frequency.

Head turning experiments provide results consistent with the view that the shifts in phonetic perception noted during the second half of the infant’s first year of life are part of a larger language learning process, and these shifts in turn pave the way for future language acquisition.

Figure 2. Both Japanese and American infants reveal equal abilities to discriminate r and l at 6 to 8 months but differ widely at 10 to 12 months.

2

____________________________________________________________*The high-amplitude sucking (HAS) technique makes use of three characteristics of babies: (1) babies like to hear sounds, (2) babies lose interest in a sound when it is presented repeatedly, and (3) babies who have lost interest in a previously repeated sound will become interested if a new sound is presented. Thus, to find out whether babies can tell the difference between two sounds, researchers present one sound until the baby loses interest, and then they present another. If the baby shows renewed interest, the researchers infer that the baby can tell that a new sound has been presented. In the HAS procedure, interest is measured by the baby's willingness to "work" to hear the sound played over a speaker. The work babies do consists of sucking on a nipple attached to a device that measures the pressure produced by the sucking. Every time the baby sucks with sufficient vigor, a sound is presented. After a while, the baby's rate of sucking declines. Once the infant demonstrates habituation to the first sound, a new speech sound is played over the speaker, and the baby typically starts sucking more rapidly. This renewed interested is referred to as dishabituation.

The head-turn procedure (HT) is used to test perception of speech sounds in infants older than 5 ½ months. Using easily discriminable sounds, researchers train the infant to turn her head when the sound being broadcast in the testing room changes. Once the infant is so trained, the infant's producing a head turn when the sound is changed is taken as evidence that the infant perceived the new sound as different from the old.

Research showing the importance of the interaction between nature and nurture is the recent study by Moffitt and Caspi (2007) on the positive effects between breastfeeding and IQ. Breastfeeding can have a positive effect on the IQ of children when combined with the right genes. On average, Breastfed children have higher tested IQ scores than non-breastfed children. However, not every breastfed child shows this IQ advantage. The association between breastfeeding and children’s IQ depends in part on the genetic makeup of the child.

Researchers followed two groups of people: the 1,000 Dunedin-born study members of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study at the University of Otago, and 2,200 British children born in 1994-95.

For this work, the IQ of study members was tested when they were children and their mothers were asked about breastfeeding practices. In addition, the FADS2 gene was tested from each study member’s DNA.

It was found that breastfed children with one or two ‘C’ versions of the FADS2 gene averaged an IQ advantage of 6 or 7 points over those children who were not breastfed. Breastfed children with two ‘G’ versions of the FADS2 gene showed no IQ advantage or disadvantage over those children not breastfed.

The results showed that both nature and nurture - the right genes and a parental decision to breast-feed - are necessary to gain the IQ advantage.

Neural Commitment

An analogy is drawn between the interaction of breast feeding and IQ and how early linguistic experience alters an adult’s perception of speech. Kuhl (2007) provides evidence of the effects of language experience at the neural level from two

3

magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies that compare adult American and Japanese listeners’ phonetic processing.

The experimental stimuli were American English /ra/ and /la/ syllables. In Experiment 1, the control stimuli were /ba/ and /wa/ syllables The results suggest that Japanese and American listeners mentally process the same acoustic information (American /r–l/ sounds) very differently. Japanese listeners process the non-native sounds less efficiently, activating larger areas of the brain for longer periods of time. Moreover, they neurally react to each acoustic change in the stimuli in a left-to right fashion. In contrast, American listeners process the native language sounds more efficiently, showing focal activation of short duration. In addition, they respond to the acoustic changes in speech events in a more integrated and holistic fashion; neural detection of change in the /r–l/ stimuli is delayed until the critical acoustic information occurs.

It is argued that early exposure to a particular language produces a “neural commitment” to the acoustic properties of that language and that this neural commitment interferes with (later) foreign language processing, making it less efficient.

2

Figure 3. Difference between adult Japanese and American responses to phonetic syllables.

Sensory Development

Sensory development such as touch and hearing begin to develop 8 weeks after conception. A fetus will respond to light or sounds at a very basic level quite early. Vision, a key sensory skill, is not fully developed until much later after birth. Even though the optics of the eye are mature, infants still can’t see as well as adults because brain areas responsible for vision are still immature. To use the camera analogy, the reason that infants' vision is blurry is because of the "film", not the lens. The retina (the film of the eye), in addition to other visual parts of the brain, is incompletely developed in infants.

It can be noted that the interventions (breastfeeding and linguistic experience) start very early in a child’s life. Babies begin to hear in the last few months of pregnancy. Thus, when infants emerge into the world, they are well equipped for

4

hearing. A baby's hearing is crucial to speech development. During this period most babies are beginning to understand the fundamentals of communication through hearing and language. When younger, a baby understands meaning through the tone of voice, Most infants (age 4-7 months) can hear and understand the different sounds a parent makes and the way words form sentences (HON, Health on the net foundation, 2008).

Inner Speech

The importance of early linguistic experience is supported by a number of studies that suggest the phonetic representation of words as a later basis for thinking and reading. Normal hearing respondents move their lips, tongue and larynx muscles when they read. This can occur overtly as in younger readers or covertly as in so called "silent reading". Edfelt (1960), Sokolov (1972), and others have shown that silent reading and silent verbal thinking, "inner speech", is a form of echoic behavior. Sokolov’s premise was that the speech muscles were in motion every time we read silently or think verbally. This action is isomorphic to the muscular patterns in overt speech. Everyone moves their lips when they read! One can demonstrate the use of the lingual muscles during silent reading by biting down on the tip of the tongue and reading the following passage. Some difficulty is usually encountered. It takes more time or its representation is phonetically altered.

Did the little old dentist drill it on Tuesday?

Figure 4. Biting down on the tip of your tongue read the above sentence.

In 1973 I was on a fellowship at the University of Stockholm. I decided to visit Sokolov in Moscow. So I said to my friends in Stockholm “Let’s call him up.” They had never called Russia from that department and it took two days and an army translator for me to make the arrangements to visit. I took a 17-day tour for $226 that went to Leningrad (Petersburg) and then to Moscow.

The tour stayed in old but fancy hotels and we drank ice-cold champagne at night served with black caviar. There were potatoes, vodka and 18-inch pickles at every meal. Our guide said she was an ambulance driver during the war and had been taught to swim by non other than Pavlov.

When I went to see Sokolov there were four interpreters in the room. I now understand that they thought I might be a spy. Professor Sokolov made myograph

5

recordings of respondent's speech muscles during silent reading and compared them with their overt recordings of the same text. The recordings were remarkably isomorphic.

Sokolov was a student of Vykotsky. I asked him about this famous theorist and he told me that Vykotsky never did any experiments. When I asked if muscular action was causal to thought he asked me what I meant by cause. I knew one answer to that:

1. There must be a correlation. A cork and a ship rise together. Their motion is correlated. But does the cork cause the ship to rise? 2. Therefore there must be a reasonable argument favoring the cause. 3. There can’t be any good alternative arguments.

1. There is a high correlation and a reasonable argument about the subliminal use of the speech muscles. 2. There are few alternative arguments. 3. While few deny that the mute can think it is difficult to deny that the muscular action of the speech muscles is facilitative.

Supposedly the same area of the brain processes sign language as well as text. Petitto (2000) has shown that hearing children exposed to both speech and sign (because one of their parents is deaf) show no preference for speech. They make babbling sounds and signs, and they go on to learn both speech and sign simultaneously. As for hearing children unexposed to speech (because both their parents are deaf), they learn sign as readily as any deaf child and become fluently bilingual when they're later exposed to speech.

Without the use of inner speech the congenitally deaf are often forced to take a different road to understanding text materials. Echoic behavior also occurs in the arm muscles of the congenitally deaf. Electromyographic recordings were made of the tensor muscles of four respondents when they were signed a story and the response signals were rapid and apparent (Dunn-Rankin, 1990). The congenitally deaf, however, have great difficulty learning to read. The speech musculature necessary to emulate different sounds is unmatched in a communication system such as signing. Signing is not usually as sophisticated as the combination of the speech muscles. When asked to sign or view "wonderful" it is difficult to discriminate it from a host of words with similar meanings, for example: great, super and wonderful are the same sign in ASL. How other synonyms are signed must be similar. .

The congenitally deaf lack the muscular training needed for speech and subsequently internal speech. I have read that over 100 face muscles are used when speaking. Phonetic representation by muscles of the lips, larynx and tongue becomes an effective highway on which thought can travel.

.

6

Phonetic Studies at UH

A number of studies related to the importance of the phoneme in learning were conducted by my students. These studies are suggestive of programs for testing and instruction in reading. Freese (1982) illustrated those respondents, who could successfully read homophone passages (Wear mite Merry bee?), were better readers. Wiladluk (1993) illustrated that Thai preschool children whose parent’s articulation was superior could be predicted to be emergent readers. Word familiarity was shown to have great staying power (Dunn-Rankin, (1987). Carol Pang (1995) ordered all the nouns in the American Heritage Dictionary and placed them into 32 categories of difficulty. Steve Berg (1995) wrote a generalized scaling program and used the Pang’s noun categories as a base. Word familiarity level was a very high predictor of reading ability. Other contributors to the importance of phonetic discrimination include Yumori (1983) who studied word meanings, Chin-Chance (1978) who studied word recognition, and Maeda (1981) and Atkins (1983) who were interested in phoneme similarity.

Homonym Passages -Articulation

Merry seas the blew see.

Merry seas a wail.

Wear mite Merry bee?

Anne Freese created a test of our ability to read phonetically and showed that respondents that could master the task were better readers. Quire and choir sound the same but are visually different, also I’ll and aisle. For example:

The quire walked down the I’ll.

More often homonyms also look alike, rows, roes and rose, pair, pear and pare.

At the wedding the quire walked down the I’ll before a pear of bridesmaids with there roes bouquets. The bride war a vale and the groom war a blew tucks.

Individuals who can sidestep or bypass the visual representation and concentrate on the sound of the words have little difficulty in understanding the meaning of such text. It turns out that this phonetic skill is an effective predictor of reading age (Nicol and Dunn-Rankin, 1994).

Perhaps all symbolic languages are also phonetic. Kangi, besides providing ideographic meaning, is also phonetic (Sachiko Matsunaga, 1995)

Wiladlak, (1994) showed that Thai parent’s articulation level was an effective predictor of emergent readers and the frequency of their reading to children predicted the child’s knowledge of print. Mother’s speech clarity is related to infant’s speech discrimination skills. (Liu, H. M., etal. (2003).

This makes me wonder how many different sounding words are in various languages. Hawaiian dictionaries contain from 15 to 20 thousand words. It is

7

estimated that English contains about 500,000 words. A French-English dictionary contains about 75,000 words. It seems reasonable that the phonetic range in English is greater than many other languages. How many sign language words are there? I have checked in Google (ASL browser) and super, great, terrific and wonderful all have the same sign. ASL dictionaries are fairly brief (2500 signs).

Word Familiarity

Figure 5. Response speeds in milliseconds for recognizing familiar and less familiar words show that even after intense practice familiar words are recognized faster.

Word familiarity has great staying power (Dunn-Rankin, 1984). Short familiar words like mom and boy are invariably responded to more quickly than less familiar words like arc or aft despite intensive practice. Over a two year period the author reacted to the tashistoscopic presentation of familiar and unfamiliar three letter words such as mom, ill, pseudo words ibm, ing, ufo and non words cpl, bir, som. Hundreds of responses were recorded. While the speed of processing increased dramatically, familiar words were always responded to more quickly than less familiar words. The correlation between the two year sets of reaction times over the rated words was greater than .84. Word familiarity is a more effective index of usage than word frequency.

8

Carol Pang (1996) ordered all the nouns in a dictionary based on familiarity. She was able to establish 32 categories of word familiarity. Steve Berg (1995) created a general scaling methodology based on a binary sort. [Show Judged at HERA]. Since scaling is based on familiarity, categories can be continually improved. The opportunity to provide a quick index to reading capability has been missed. Hours of on site test taking could be reduced to minutes of evaluation using a computer.

Measuring Phonemic Similarity

Maeda (1981) gave us a dimensional map of all the phonemes. The distances between phonemes could then be used to determine the auditory similarity between words. Dunn-Rankin (1972) provided a method of measuring visual similarity that is applied to phonemes. In her dissertation Maeda utilized the process to calculate auditory similarity. For example rat and ram are compared with bland and plant. The similarity indices indicate that the bland-plant pair is more similar and would be more difficult to discriminate.

r ae p b l ae n d

r ae m p l ae n t

________________ _______________________

0 + 0 + .78 = .78 .43 + 0 + 0 + 0 + .55 = .98

.78 / 6 = .130 .98/10 = .098

Figure 6. An example of determining phonetic similarity.

Atkins showed that pin and pen differ by the distance between i and e. But familiarity plays an important part in word discrimination. Thus clove and clothe are almost auditorally indistinguishable because they are less familiar. The bases for constructing more sensitive auditory discrimination tests were established.

Cognitive Representation

Yumori defended meaning as the centroid of the frequency, recency, and potency of our experience with a word. If one hears or reads the following sentences:

“It was a sunny day. A man stood smoking a cigar. A dog ran down the street. Next to the school yard a bright red and white ball came to rest against the fence.”

Now I ask “What kind of dog was it?” Yumori indicated that the imagined dog may not exist but is a generalized representation i.e., the centroid of our experience with dogs. Thus given one’s experience with a fox terrier, great Dane, German shepard, collie etc. the generalized dog lies near the mean of a cluster of paired similarities. In Ponape there was only one kind of poi dog. When the Village owners imported their Irish wolfhound the local population didn’t know what to make of it. Yumori extended this idea to abstract nouns such as honesty, vanity; etc. It seems rational to assume that an understanding of a word should be based on wide representation of

9

examples. If one understands that a cow, porpoise, bat and man are all mammals the commonality in these wide spread examples provides meaning.

Vocabulary Acquisition

Dunn-Rankin, Pat studied vocabulary acquisition and showed that a variety of specific approaches was most important. These were; hearing the word in a sentence, saying the word, identifying the word from among similar visual representations and learning its definition and knowing synonyms and antonyms. Least effective were context clues and Latin roots. This dissertation suggests that auditory discrimination should be encouraged.

Auditory Before Visual

At birth normal children’s auditory capability is already well developed (Craven). Infants can take advantage of their discrimination ability right away. Music and language can be immediately attended. Emphasis should be placed on these sensory capabilities as opposed to visual stimuli.

The auditory critical growth period for the fetus begins at or around 32 week’s gestation (about eight weeks before birth). It continues in the first and probably into the second year of life. The most important periods are the earlier gestational months when the auditory stimuli result in changes in the auditory nucleus. The critical period is essential for the development of frequency discrimination, and pattern recognition.

One type of sensory interference occurs when stimuli are out of sequence or when their intensity is inappropriate for the stage of development. Either circumstance will produce interference in the normal sensory development process. The most common examples of sensory interference are the early introduction of visual stimuli before auditory patterns are learned and in place. Early introduction of visual stimuli to newborn puppies will interfere with both auditory discrimination and with chemosensory discrimination, particularly smell.

The advent of television in young children’s lives has to interact with any reading program. A study ( , 2007) illustrates the degree to which TV invades the time that might be used to read to very young children. The illustration below shows that children as young as one year of age are looking at television for over an hour each day.( Show slide).

10

Figure 7. Television and DVD/video viewing by content and age among those with any viewing (locally weighted smoothing regression).

Figure 8. In a study, Reading Across the Nation, less than half of all parents or other family members read, every day, to their children under 5 years of age.

Zimmerman, F. and colleagues (in Press) examined the usefulness of infant educational videos. They found that, contrary to advertiser’s claims, watching educational videos geared towards increasing infants' and toddlers' vocabulary actually had the opposite effect. On average, for every hour per day infants under

11

17 months of age spent watching these videos, they learned 6-8 less words than children who did not watch the videos. Researchers believe this is because babies learn language best through interactions and conversations. They maintain that parents and caretakers are the first and best educators a child has, and that quality time with an infant is the best way to encourage learning.

Recommendations

It is imperative to read to children at an early age. In this way they learn to maintain the discrimination of all the phonetic contrasts that are necessary to process the ambient language including text language. The phonetic representation of text is somewhat different from the patterns of regular speech. This results in young children learning the prosody of text. I had thought that text language would be important if it helped infants become bilingual in both text and natural languages. Perhaps the two languages are not that different. The flow or completeness of text is different from natural speech with its pauses and silent gestures. However, many of the words are the same. There is a standardized repetition of sounds in text language that enhances the frequency of discriminations in English phonemes. If one reads Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales the reader can understand that there is a melody to text.

“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. …”

In general, the internal phonetic representation created by the speech muscles is a great highway down which thought can travel. The construction of this highway must be started early in life. Reading to a young child enhances their emulation and discrimination of text language as well as the oral native language.

I am concerned that within Hawaii’s large immigrant and native Hawaiian population standard English language production is not fully articulated. For many, in these families, English is a second language. Studies like Khul’s (2005) have shown that important and extensive learning takes place at a very early age. Yet Colleges of Education remain detached from early childhood learning. The structure of teacher certification does not reach into the early years of development

The need for effective, articulate models of speech suggest that good pronunciation even choral reading should be practiced in today’s classrooms. The relationship between this echoic behavior and attending to the sounds of native and text languages should be apparent.5, May 2007

These studies pave the way for educational intervention. As Ridley (1999, p77) has pointed out: "Mother Nature has plainly not entrusted the determination of our intellectual capacities to the blind fate of a gene or genes; she gave us parents, learning, language, culture and education to program ourselves with."

12

I believe that the rationale for reading to very young children is now unambiguous. It is clear that very early intervention programs could change education in Hawaii dramatically. Don Leton (2007) suggested, however, that implementing a program of reading to infants of immigrants was like trying to put a teapot in orbit around Mars and that we need to “Save our breath to cool our soup”. The recommendation is that children hear the sound of a useful and productive language early in life. It is quite clear that we need to "Save our breath to cool our soup" for some situations. I don't know if there are any answers but there are some possibilities. One is to have someone else beside the immigrant parents read to the young children. Pat Dunn-Rankin had highly successful projects with her students at Leeward CC where they would read to young relatives. The provision of books and a program for reading to young children can begin just after delivery in hospitals and the wide spread advertising of the importance of early reading to later success are two interventions that seem reasonable.

References

Atkins, C. S. (1983). Auditory Discrimination Based on Interphonemic Distances. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Berg, S. (1995). A Generalized Model for Interactive Computer Assessment. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Caspi A, etal. (2007) Moderation of breastfeeding effects on the IQ by genetic variation in fatty acid metabolism. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. Nov 20;104(47):18860-5. Epub 2007 Nov

Chin-Chance, S. (1978). A Mathematical Model of Word Recognition Strategies. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Chuawanlee, W. (1993). Determinants of Emergent Reading. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Dunn-Rankin, P. (1978). The visual characteristics of words. Scientific American, 238(1).

Dunn-Rankin, P. (1978). Using after images in the analysis of letter and word focalization. Journal of Reading Behavior 9(2).

Edfeldt, A. W. (1960). Silent Speech and Silent Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freese, Anne R.B. (1982) The Relationship of Phonological Coding to Reading Proficiency. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Jusczyk, P. W., Goodman, M. B. and Baumann A. (1999). Nine-Month-Olds' Attention to Sound Similarities in Syllables. Journal of Memory and Learning, Vol 40, 62-82.

13

Leton, D. (2007) Personal communication.

Liu, H. M., etal. (2003). Developmental Science 6, f1-f10)

Moffitt, T & Caspi, A. (2007) Nature, nurture and the IQ: Moderation of breastfeeding effects on the IQ by genetic variation in fatty acid metabolism. British Study, Gene-Environment Interaction, King’s College, London

Nikaido, A., et al. (1984, August). Early Medical Complications, Ongoing Home Involvement, and Later Preschool Development. Paper presented at the American Psychological Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada.

Pang, C. (1995). Ordering A Large Lexicon. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Petitto, Laura Ann. “On the biological foundations of human language,” in Emmorey et al, Eds., The Signs of Language Revisited. [CITY?]: Lawrence Erlbaum. 2000, 449-473.

Ridley, M. (1999). Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. London: Fourth Estate Ltd.

Segall, M. E. (1972). Cardiac responsivity to auditory stimulation in preterm infants. Nursing Research, 21, 15-19. Heart rate improved when recording of mother’s voice was provided improving stage 2 sleep.

Schmidt, K., Rose, S. A., & Bridgar, W. H. (1980). Effect of heartbeat sound on the cardiac and behavioral responsiveness to tactual stimulation in sleeping preterm infants. Developmental Psychology, 16, 175-184.

Taketa-Maeda, A. (1981) A Multidimensional Analysis of the Phonemes of English: A Perceptual Study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Yumori, W. C. (1983). The Semantic Representation of Abstract Concepts: Mapping Intensional and Extensional Definitions. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Zhang, Y. T., Khul P. K., Imada T., Kotani M. and Tohk Y. (2005) Effects of language experience: Neural commitment to language-specific auditory patterns. NeuroImage 26, 703– 720

Zimmerman, F., Christakis, D. & Meltzoff, A. (in press). Associations between media viewing and language development in children under age 2 years. Journal of Pediatrics.

14