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

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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