- If this isn't an honest-to-goodness crystal ball, it's close.
Neurobiologist Nina Kraus believes she and her team at Northwestern University have found a way — a half-hour test — to predict kids' literacy skill long before they're old enough to begin reading.
Cool! This adds to the evidence that reading ability is ultimately influenced by sensory abilities. Postmortem studies of dyslexic children's brains have shown weird abnormalities in early visual and auditory processing areas of the brain. Training kids to better recognize speech sounds improves their reading capabilities quite a bit. There's even some evidence that dyslexic children improve after being trained on discriminating movement direction in random dot fields! Crazy stuff.
I wonder if the difference in skill is not only to do with listening, but also to do with the ability to process symbols. It could be that the children who recognize the "da" as a repeating element do so because they assign it some sort of symbol, say x, and process all instances of it as x, whereas the children who do not recognize the "da" as a repeating element do so because they have not assigned a symbol to it and, therefore, expect a different instance each time.
That would translate, when they were older, into reading. A symbol-recognizing child would simply learn that knife reads /'naɪf/, and means sharp cutting object, whereas a non-recognizer would painstakingly read each instance phonetically and thus find it harder to translate into meaning? I wonder if similar patterns are replicated in symbolic languages and phonetic languages. It would be interesting to compare, say, reading development between Chinese kids and Spanish kids or something. I'm totally waffling, I know nothing about any of this. Child development is FASCINATING though, thanks for posting this!
You know IPA?! Marry me. Anyhow, this would be interesting to look into, although I'm not totally convinced that there would be a qualitative difference between Chinese and English. Most models of reading in dyslexia assume, implicitly or explicitly, that reading involves converting symbols into speech sounds internally, then processing those speech sounds, so that when . English doesn't have a one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds anyway (i.e., "th" is one sound, not two, and can be realized as either [θ] or [ð]). So in that sense Chinese is just an extreme case of such symbolism. But it would be fascinating to see if degree of symbolism in orthography affects reading in some way./'naɪf/
I LOVE IPA! I only really know the characters that correspond to European languages - I'd have problems trying to write down what this guy's saying, for example. I only know it because I somewhat arbitrarily took some linguistics modules at university, but it is so useful. I use it almost daily - and it has saved me some embarrassing pronunciation errors. I wonder why it isn't something we teach in schools?
I feel like it would come in more useful than learning phonics (the standard teaching method for reading in the UK), in the long run.
Marry me.
OK cool, does that mean I get a green card?
I trade a UK passport which is useful for being protected by the Queen wherever you go :)