Big Bottleneck: Translating Between Letters and Sounds:

David Boulton: If we were to make a serial temporal map of the cycles of processing involved in reading and looked at the visual input and the phonological assembly and looked at the loop through comprehension memory – we would end up with, I think, revealing that the big bottleneck in time is the translation between letters and sounds.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Absolutely. And I’m talking about the lower level of the perception and the processing speeds critical to the perception.

David Boulton: Yes, but that’s critical to the higher levels of comprehension. It’s critical to everything. It’s consuming bandwidth and it’s consuming time.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Exactly, but if you don’t have the proper template what can you understand? What information can you feed the comprehension system?

David Boulton: As we know, some letter sounds depend on the word’s meaning which depends on the sentence or context’s meaning. So, the amount of buffering that has to happen in time to hold the information necessary to disambiguate the correspondences is very large here, compared to just about anything else humans have every done.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Right. Exactly. And you need to do it quite fast, if the information processing involved in order not to forget or fade out takes too long the process will not work. So, you don’t have the time for the system to process the information in a slow manner. Yes, exactly.

David Boulton: Well, this is wonderful. As I talk to neuroscientists and so many other people, they seem to take for granted the confusions in the code so much that they don’t look at this dimension.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Exactly. And let me tell you something more. I think that there is a scientist in America called Robert Kail. He’s the one that has been doing research for many years on the speed of processing. He thinks it is a characteristic of the human brain, meaning that it has, whether we are a good or poor reader, it has a certain speed of processing, as a character. And that also contributes to the whole issue of early cognitive processes.

If I have a different processing speed than you that will affect any cognitive activities that we are doing. On top of it is one of the modalities impaired in terms of speed or slowness, so that its an additional cause that affects the entire reading process? Am I clear?  

Early Language Exercise and Later Reading:

David Boulton: Yes, completely. One of the people that we’ve interviewed is a researcher by the name of Todd Risley. He co-wrote the book called, Meaning Differences in the Everyday Experiences of American Children, where they studied language exposure across the socio-economic spectrum of children in a very well done research project. What they found is that the difference between taciturn parents, parents that don’t talk very much, and talkative parents resulted in an almost forty million word exposure difference by age four.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Hmm.

David Boulton: And that that difference in word exposure, just language, has a really strong correspondence to third and fourth grade reading scores and has a .78 correspondence to the Stanford-Binet Intelligence test.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Hmm.

David Boulton: So, that makes perfect sense that the language environment is the primary exercise environment of the verbal muscle.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Yes.

David Boulton: And so children that have more complex, high speed language environments that they’re engaging in are being exercised in a way that prepares them for reading later because of processing speed issues, because of phonemic awareness differentiation issues and because of vocabulary, that’s radically different than those that are not having that kind of nurturing verbal environment.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Very interesting.

David Boulton: So, what I’m trying to say is, that for the most part, the variation we see in the performance of children coming into reading has less to do with their bio-physiological differences and more to do with their learning environment differences.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Exactly. One of the good hopes about the whole issue is that because we are so focused on the phonological difficulties of learning the code, as you say, the timing is improved in the intervention programs that focus on phonological training. And that helps to increase phonologically the processing fluency and accuracy.

And we know that we can train the brain to do better. I think that when we focus on trainings that actually tackle the problem directly we can do it.

David Boulton: Yes, which is like doing a deconstruction of the process to feed neuroplastic exercise.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Exactly.

David Boulton: Are you familiar with Keith Rayner’s work?

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: On the eye movements?

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Yes.

David Boulton: Are you familiar with Paula Tallal’s Fast ForWord program?

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: It’s a very controversial one.

David Boulton: Yes, okay. Forgive me if I’m being naïve with you.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: You know, in Hebrew we have a different difficulty.

David Boulton: Right. What you’re describing as far as the exercise seems to be along the lines of the principal intentions of those two different directions. Keith Rayner uses narrowing windows and higher speed visual word presentation and Fast ForWord uses variations in increasing the speed of sounds recognition – both of which are different dimensions of exercising what you’re describing.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: I think that if you really would like to train the brain to do better, what we found in Hebrew was that when you use context. I mean, we are talking about sentences and not about separate phonemes – you can do better because there is a reciprocity between comprehension and decoding and it helps more to induce this reading speed and understanding and reduce the decoding errors.

I would argue that maybe instead of taking phonemes like Fast ForWord is doing, to take more larger chunks of words in context.

David Boulton: Right. So, in this sense, we’re talking about something that has some of the principles of Whole Language meaning that you want to create meaningful experiences that increase the interest and that are comprehensible, on the one hand. At the same time you want to structure that in a way that’s calling attention to the letter-sound patterns in a way that the code can be learned. They both have to function together.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Yes, exactly. I’m not talking about acquiring reading skills, I’m talking about later on training. The training system later on.

David Boulton: Okay, understood. My primary concern is we’ve got many millions of children in our school systems whose lives are being twisted because they can’t learn to do this well.

The Effect of Affect on Cognition:

David Boulton: There is one other piece that I want to talk about and that is the effect of affect on cognition. And in particular, it seems that children or adults who struggle with reading blame themselves.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Yes, the same with society here.

David Boulton: They think that the confusion that they’re experiencing and the difficulty they’re experiencing is some reflection of something wrong with them. This quickly snowballs over time, for people that have difficulty over the course of trying to take off in reading, into an aversion to reading. You talk to a lot of people that have had difficulty with this and they want to avoid it because it triggers this feeling about themselves. That’s a gross level emotional thing. (see Shame Stories)

But at a finer level, it seems that the moment that somebody goes into self-consciousness about doing this it distracts the brain, distracts and consumes bandwidth and it eats up time. So that in addition to the purely code language level processing, there’s an emotional component on the one side creating the interest that powers the attention and on the other side, as soon as it goes negative, busting up and stuttering up the processing fluidity. This is a cognitive problem in the sense that it is fundamentally affecting the cognitive processing ecology and efficiency.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Exactly. I think the only way to deal with it is if there is a way to identify any cognitive reading difficulties as early as possible and to prevent all kinds of emotional difficulties and reciprocity between the two.

David Boulton: Yes. My question is, do you know anybody, or have you yourself tried to use your equipment to detect, the triggering of negative affect and its effects, the disruption and turbulence that happens to cognition, during the task of reading?

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Not that I know of.

David Boulton: Given the time precarious nature of all of this, this seems like it’s a critically important component to understanding reading at this deep level.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Yes, exactly. I’m sure that the results are positive between the two, between the affect level and cognitive difficulties. Definitely. We know it from the hyper-active phenomena which is causing the effect of the comorbidity of hyperactivity and reading difficulties. Which one effects what? It’s the same thing.

I think that there is somebody who was doing the research on the affect effect on learning disabilities in general. She’s a lady in the Special Education Department at the University of Toronto. Her name is Judy Winer, but she’s not doing any brain-based research, only behavioral research.

David Boulton: Excellent, thank you. Well, I think it’s really important to bring neuroscience research to bear on the role of affect in both powering and disempowering and turbulating cognitive tasks here at this level.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Yes, I’m sure that you’re right. Definitely right. It’s complicated to measure it. When you want to study reading you put symbols on the screen. The affect is a bit complicated.

David Boulton: Yes, but I think there are people out there that are doing work that can show different dimensions of affect like facial display signatures, so that it’s possible to co-relate, to take facial display information, other biometrics and superimpose them over data that’s being gathered through systems like you’re using to show the correlated effect.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Yes, it is a good idea.

David Boulton: Is there anything else that you think would be important to our conversation here before we close.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Not that I can think about right now, but maybe later when I read the transcript.

David Boulton: Okay. And please, anytime if you encounter something or come up with something that you think would be of benefit please send me an email – I’d like to get right back on the phone with you. And, if you come to America I’d love to meet with you and shoot a video interview.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Good, if I come to America I will let you know and you have an open invitation to come to Haifa.

David Boulton: Thank you, a great pleasure to talk with you.

Dr. Zvia Breznitz: Same here.