Reading

In typical development, the ability to use spoken language is acquired early in the life span, showing a normative progression that may vary in timing but is generally achieved by most individuals. For this reason, language is often thought to develop as a matter of maturation. Much in the way that children grow in size and develop the ability to walk, children develop the ability to communicate with spoken language. Barring irregularities in biological underpinnings or extreme environmental deprivation, children learn spoken communication in conditions of noisy and inconsistent input, and the developmental pattern is largely predictable. Reading, by contrast, is a culturally grounded practice that requires systematic instruction and thousands of hours of practice for the achievement of proficiency. Thus, reading is not acquired naturally but relies on neural systems that evolved for other functions. Specifically, learning to read requires that brain systems responsible for object recognition and spoken language understanding be tuned, so that they respond to print. Further, in contemporary ecologies of literacy, in which the reader can use electronic media to find and consume texts for particular purposes, reading increasingly involves mechanisms that evolved for search. This entry provides a life-span view of reading, considering how this critical skill is typically acquired and used for learning in different contexts. For brevity, we focus on alphabetic languages in which printed characters correspond to speech sounds (e.g., English), but many of the principles apply to logographic languages in which printed characters correspond to concepts (e.g., Chinese).

In an expert reader, the many component processes needed to decode print into meaning are fluently executed in a flexible and coordinated manner. The expert reader recognizes most words effortlessly and activates their meaning representations (i.e., concepts); for a novel word, the expert reader is able to analyze the orthography [Page 1810](i.e., printed characters) to create a representation of its phonology (i.e., sound pattern) and often to use contextual cues to infer meaning. Language structure (syntax) is used to determine how concepts are related to create an integrated representation of the meaning of a sentence (semantics). While the meaning of a text can be represented almost purely as semantic (as an abstract set of interrelationships), proficient readers also create mental simulations (situation models) of events in narratives and of systems and their interacting parts in expository texts (e.g., how does a pulley work? what are the procedures to pass legislation?). Situation models, then, depend on an integration of the semantic context given directly by the text with a reader’s knowledge. Importantly, expert readers use these mental representations of semantics and situations as a stimulus for thought—using texts as a platform to learn new information, to make decisions, to solve problems, to create, to mentally travel to places that are ordinarily inaccessible (e.g., space travel, ancient Rome), to gain access to social worlds beyond one’s community, and to experience events and emotional reactions from another person’s perspective. The development of this complex procedural skill is often characterized as a progression from learning to read (in early childhood) to reading to learn (starting in the middle elementary school years), but in fact learning to read can be a life-span endeavor.

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