Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 15

Humans have been reading for around 3,500 years. Or at least writing has been around for about that long, which is all we have to go on. Reading science is much younger. Although reports of patients with acquired reading disorders appeared earlier (Berlin, 1887; Kussmaul, 1878), Cattell’s (1886) experiments on the time it takes to read words and letter strings mark the beginning of experimental reading research. The broader research findings published by E. B. Huey (1908), who acknowledged contemporary research by Erdmann and Dodge, are the most substantial landmark for a beginning of reading science. Indeed, most of Huey’s observations in the Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading remain foundational for reading science: word perception, the “inner voice” in silent reading, meaning, and “interpretation,” the evolution of writing and the alphabetic principle. Notably omitted was dyslexia, a slight that was repaid by Orton (1925) when he ignored Huey’s book and its research in his classic work “Word Blindness.”

Much of the progress since has been enabled by tools that reveal the intricate and interleaved processes and knowledge interactions that occur rapidly in reading: Eye tracking, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and chronometric behavioral measures can detect the processes that constitute the rapid stream of reading. The products of these processes – the slower stream of reading – are exposed by behavioral output measures, and by imaging tools that identify brain areas associated with these processes. Beyond laboratory tools, the development of computational modeling has added precision to theoretical accounts and large language corpora provide statistical tools for the modeling of reading processes.