Delphi module

7.1.3
Word recognition and memory

Reflective task 6

Read the following two texts as quickly as you can:

On the third day of the match immediately preceding the First Test in Faisalabad, there was an explosive moment on this tour of extreme sensitivity when Caddick blew up at a poor decision by Akhtar Venkataraghavan, the Pakistani umpire, who gave the batsman, Mohammad Azharuddin not out, even though the latter was clearly playing no stroke.
On the first day, Mr Badger knocked once on Mr Pig's door and Mr Pig ignored him. On the second day, Mr Badger knocked twice on Mr Pig's door and Mr Pig shouted 'go away'. On the third day, Mr Badger knocked three times on Mr Pig's door and Mr Pig came out and chased him all the way back into the woods.

What was the difference in your reading of these two texts? Which was easier to read and why? Click on 'Commentary' for some feedback.

Whether in L1 or L2, effective reading depends on the reader's ability to recognize words very quickly, if not automatically. Words which are automatically and accurately recognized by readers are called their 'sight vocabulary'. L1 reading research (eg Harrison, 1992) suggests that as fluent readers' eyes move over a text, they look at or 'fixate', almost all the printed words but move easily over them, missing out occasional words, although rarely more than two consecutive ones. By contrast, poor readers rely on the slow sounding out of letters or syllables, called 'phonemic decoding', a tactic also adopted by fluent readers when they come across words which do not belong to their sight vocabulary.

For Stanovich (1992: 4), good word recognition or a large sight vocabulary is a crucial part of good comprehension, but it is not on its own enough. Automatic recognition promotes so-called 'lexical access' which is the (again automatic) process of remembering a word's 'phonological representation' and its meanings, which includes both semantic meaning and syntactic meaning, or how the word is being used in the particular context. Where lexical access is less than automatic and the reader has to focus consciously on spelling and meaning, a greater burden is placed on memory and reading slows.

A common experience when reading dense or complex text with several words that do not belong to our sight vocabulary, is that by the time we reach the end of a sentence we have forgotten what was said at the beginning. Adams (1994: 854-7) argues that we hold the phonological representations of words in working memory and interpret them while we are reading or in the brief pauses which occur at the end of a clause or sentence. In so doing, readers 'work out the collective meaning of the chain of words in memory and that meaning's contribution to their overall understanding of the … text' (Adams, 1994: 857). Where there is phonological overload and we cannot hold parts of a text in our working memory long enough, then our understanding of the text breaks down.