| The
science of reading
Ada
Tam
Marcus
Taft is a psychology professor at the University of New
South Wales whose influential research on psycholinguistics
makes him one of the pioneers in this field. For the past
thirty years, Taft has investigated the influence orthography
and morphology has on reading
ability and differences between readers in other languages
such as French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese.
Professor Marcus Taft
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Taft
proposes that it is the BOSS (Basic Orthographic Syllabic
Structure) that guides the process of ‘breaking up’ longer
words when reading. The BOSS is a combination of letters
that form a syllable that has an onset,
vowel and coda, such as ‘cat’ in ‘catapult’.
This syllable maximises how informative the first part
of a word is by taking the onset of the next syllable
as the coda of the first, even if it contradicts with
the pronunciation. For example, when you read the word
‘cigar’, it is mentally processed as ‘cig-ar’ even though
you pronounce it as ‘ci-gar’.
Morphemes
may also play a part in how we process words. Taft believes
that when a prefixed word such as ‘retrieve’ has been
recognised, it is split into prefix (re) and stem (trieve)
components, and the reading of the word is based on the
stem only. Taft argues that ‘trieve’ is the BOSS rather
than ‘ret’, which means that the BOSS does not necessarily
have to be the first syllable of a word.
It is likely
that the same basic system is used across different languages.
However, for languages that are more syllabic, people
are more reliant on the pronunciation of the word when
reading. When native speakers of a foreign language read
English, they read in the same way that they would for
their native tongue. Therefore, the letters are combined
and grouped differently from the best possible way for
English. The clearest example is Japanese, which is based
on a consonant-vowel structure.
“Consonant-vowel
is represented by a single character in the writing system.
A word like ‘lemon’ would have ‘le’ as a unit and ‘mo’
as another unit. For them, to put the ‘m’ with ‘le’ would
be entirely alien. And that is going to lead to problems
if the optimal way of reading English is to put the ‘m’
with the ‘le’.”
Some useful applications
Taft’s
research has the potential to improve ways of teaching
children how to read. He believes that better readers
may make use of the BOSS whereas poorer readers might
rely on the spoken syllable. Nevertheless, he expresses
caution in publicising his preliminary findings.
In
the future, the BOSS may improve methods for teaching
children how to read. Photo: Joana
Franca |
“If
I could get stronger evidence that can convince even me
that this is the way that poorer readers process words,
and this is the way that better readers process words,
then I would be very keen to translate that to the education
setting,” says Taft.
Some of his
research on Chinese already had some practical applications.
One of his studies has shown that linking the Chinese
characters to its individual components facilitates learning
of written Chinese. Furthermore, he has applied for a
patent on improvements to pinyin, the Chinese alphabetic
system that teaches pronunciation.
Funding and plans for the future
Although
psycholinguistics is a relatively small area in psychology,
Taft has been fortunate to receive continuous funding
since joining the academic staff at UNSW in 1981. He reflects
that it may be useful to develop a reputation in a smaller
area and that “it may be easier to be a big fish in a
small pond than it is to be a small fish in a big pond.”
However, Taft is quick to point out that this has been
largely due to the influence of his PhD supervisor, Ken
Forster. “Lexical processing, word recognition, and psycholinguistics
in general are proportionally quite strong in Australia.
His [Ken Forster] students and other people have been
influenced by him.”
At the moment,
Taft is in the first year of a three-year grant and is
currently trying to integrate reading, speech recognition
and spoken output. He hopes to have a few PhD students
working in psycholinguistics in the future once there
is more concrete evidence for individual differences between
readers, as he would like to push that into an applied
direction.
“I am reaching
a stage of my career where one should be tying it altogether,
or looking for new areas,” says Taft. “I certainly go
through periods with my research and have done a few years
where you feel a bit jaded with the whole thing. And then,
what it needs is some exciting findings, something new
that you didn’t expect to emerge, or an idea that you
have.”
Taft reveals
that in the future there may be “some major change in
direction” in his own research as he is interested in
episodic memory. A future honours student’s work may also
influence him in this regard.
“They might
come in and say they are interested in a particular area
and work towards a project,” says Taft. “That might trigger
me [to do] a new line of research if it comes out in an
interesting way.”
See OnSET's Why
do we say the things we do?
Glossary
Coda
syllable: Phonetic sound at the end of the word
Morpheme:
The smallest unit in a word that has meaning or a grammatical
function
Morphology:
Form and meaning
Onset syllable:
Phonetic sound at the beginning of the word
Orthography:
Spelling; form of the word
Psycholinguistics:
The study of the psychology of language
Further Reading
Taft,
M. (1979). Lexical access via an orthographic code: The
basic orthographic syllabic structure (BOSS). Journal
of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 18,
21–39.
Taft,
M. (2002). Orthographic processing of polysyllabic words
by native and nonnative English speakers. Brain &
Language, 81, 532–544.
Taft,
M. & Chung, K. (1999). Using radicals in teaching
Chinese characters to second language learners. Psychologia,
42, 243–251.
Taft,
M., & Forster, K. I. (1975). Lexical storage and retrieval
of prefixed words. Journal of Verbal Learning &
Verbal Behavior, 14, 638–647.
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