Role of Speed in Word Recognition:

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Well, maybe just a few words to understand the role of speed in word recognition, because it is significant in the cross-linguistic literature, whenever comparisons have been made with English. The one big factor distinguishing good readers from poor readers of relatively regular writing systems is reading speed, whereas in English it tends to be accuracy. But, once English children master word recognition to some reasonable degree of fluency, of course, the appropriate measure again becomes speed. So again, how you measure things affects the types of generalizations that you might make about what's language specific and what's universal. Really, when you compare like with like, when you're comparing children who decode to a similar level of proficiency or accuracy, speed plays a similar role as well.

For example, when we work with English-speaking adult dyslexics, in university contexts, very often these are people who can read quite accurately, although they clearly have a diagnosis of dyslexia and they're perhaps reading and spelling at a level lower than would be expected, but where they begin to look like poor readers of more transparent orthographies is on anything that requires speedy responses, decoding, phonological awareness, phonological processing tasks, they are typically massively impaired in speed.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: So I would say speed is another component.

David Boulton: What else should we say about these foundations that you've managed to shine light on? We've talked about speed; we've talked about the reciprocal effects of reading and spelling, the symmetry or resonance, dissonance between oral language structure and orthography. What are some of the other things that we could say that are universal before we go on to explore the differences?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: We've covered the main ones, I would say.

David Boulton: You're closer to this than I am. So if there's something you think that we're not talking about that we should...

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: No. I'd say the foundations of phoneme awareness and letter knowledge are universal within alphabetic orthographies, along with the role of the developing recoding (spelling) and decoding skills and the role of speed. I'd say those are the key ones.

David Boulton: Okay. So then we can go on to discussing the core components that are involved in the challenge of becoming literate and then how those challenges differ in the structures of different oral languages and how those differences correspond, complement, or create difficulties in the context of orthography. Is that right?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: Can we move to that stage now?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

The Structure of Oral Language:

David Boulton: All right. So what aspect of the structure of oral language -- setting aside orthography temporarily do you think is important to understand in order to move towards this cross-linguistic differentiation?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Well, there are definitely elements that have to do with the phonology, such as the syllable structure of the language, that certainly seem to affect children's ability to access and become aware of various sublexical units for phonological processing. So things like: how frequent are consonant clusters in a language, and how frequently can they occur at the beginning or end of a syllable or a word, how variable are they allowed to be in a language? I think all of those kinds of things are important -- so the phonotactic kinds of factors.

David Boulton: So restrictions in terms of sound combination constraints which are inherent to the language environment that they've developed in.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Certainly, and these are dimensions within languages that can vary quite dramatically. One reason why Czech is a good language for comparison with English is because, for example, Czech is quite unusual in that it allows very large clusters of several consonants to occur at the beginnings of words, and in a very wide range of combinations, many of which would be completely illegal and unpronounceable in English.

Now, the argument is that if you have to learn, from birth, to actually discriminate and pronounce these kinds of sequences well enough to be understood in your language -- then perhaps that sensitizes you to, or focuses you more on particular aspects that play a heavy functional role in the language.

David Boulton: To use the analog from the machine world, you could almost say that it formats your processing in a certain way.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes, you wouldn't necessarily logically come to that conclusion, because you could argue that the more frequent that certain larger chunks are in your language, the more prone you should become to treating them as units. But it seems that it's both the frequency and the amount of variability in the kinds of sounds are allowed to alternate with each other that plays a pretty important role. And so I'd say that's one thing, syllable structure and phonotactics. And the other big one that I think we really haven't paid very much attention to yet, but I think that's coming, is the role of prosody and of stress. That really is not a trivial component for English speaking children, not a trivial part of the ambiguity. The ambiguous mappings have a lot to do with the fact that we have reduced vowels.  We have unstressed syllables and stressed syllables, and It tends to be the unstressed ones where you end up with this ambiguous “schwa” sound for a vowel, and mapping vowel letters to the “schwa” bits --that is probably the most ambiguous part of the mapping challenge in English. There are languages that have open syllable structure, which means they don't have consonants at the end, they tend to have consonant/vowel/consonant/vowel sequences, so they're perceptually quite clearly defined

David Boulton: They have more distinct unitization.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes. With the vowels in some languages you don't have alternating stress, so there's much less vowel reduction. For example, in French, even though French has a complex orthography, it has much less vowel reduction; it has fixed stress, on the final syllable, and, consistent with that, we’ve found that French children tend to make fewer reading and spelling errors related to vowels.

David Boulton: And all these variabilities compound into greater ambiguity.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes. It's not just about how many letters can map onto a single sound, but it's the other way around as well; and why are some sounds mapping onto large numbers of different letters?

David Boulton: Right. And historically, just as an aside, it is a relationship between the spelling and the sound system and the pronunciation and the stress, and how they co-evolved that just fascinates me.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: It is very interesting.

David Boulton: If there wasn't such correspondence confusion in the way the orthography began and developed, then there would be entirely different spelling consistencies.  And then if there were different spelling consistencies, that would affect our pronunciation and use.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: And that would affect how we've learned to stress differently -- I mean, this is all interacting in a really complex way.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Very complex, very true. And I think we're quite far away in the understanding of it; we're not nearly there.

David Boulton: Yeah, yeah. What continues to amaze me is that we've created situations in which five and six-year-old children, when faced with the kinds of confusions we're describing and talking about, feel as though being confused is a reflection of something wrong with themselves.

That we could let that go on is what most upsets me.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: Anyway, so you were talking about the stress. So what else can we add into that space?

Other Contributors to the Ambiguity:

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: There are things about how languages are structured morphologically. That is another layer that can make orthography more ambiguous. For example, in inflected languages like the Slavic languages, you tend to have consistency, both phonologically and orthographically between the stem spelling and the stem pronunciation, and the spellings and pronunciations of the inflected bits at the beginning or at the end. It's one reason why Slavic languages remain relatively transparent. It has to do with the way that the language combines morphemes into meaningful word units.  Whereas in English you have this trade-off between the morphology of a word and its phonology, and the fact that often the spelling reflects the morphological value of the word in a trade-off against its pronunciation, or the phonological value, that’s another source of ambiguity.

David Boulton: Another layer of complexity.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: It's another reason why languages might be easier or more difficult to learn. But on the other hand, I think one thing that people tend to underestimate is the complexity of learning even in these more transparent systems. You know, even though kids can learn the most basic skills more quickly, there tend to be other aspects of the language system that complicate the way that written language represents it. And so very often -- I'd say in most European languages, children are not fully literate by the end of grade one or end of grade two, even if they can read words quite accurately. They may have a lot more to learn about, say, complex grammatical relationships that cause some subtle confusions or inconsistencies, especially for spelling.

David Boulton: The challenges are distributed differently.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

The Fallacy of International Comparisons:

David Boulton: Yes. People throw around comparisons of how well different countries are doing with reading.  I once asked Reid Lyon:  How can we value these international comparisons if we don't have sufficient granularity in the frameworks we're using to compare them to be able to look at all the different language specific challenges across the spectrum from learning to speak it to becoming masterful with its orthography - if we don't have a map of those different, distinct, language specific challenge components? How do we cross compare them?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yeah, I think that's a very good question. And that's a very big point. It's very difficult.  In some ways, it is probably easiest to make these cross-language comparisons in the very early stages, the foundation stage, because you can take an alphabetic system and say, okay, at the very beginning, kids probably need to have skills  "A" and "B," and possibly "C." But beyond that, it's quite true, there are real big methodological issues that have to do with how can you compare, say,reading comprehension across languages? I'm sure that eventually we will figure out a fairly reliable way to do it, but we really don't have the tools yet to make specific reliable statements.

David Boulton: And yet, the comparisons that we do have enormous political force in how we allocate money, how important we see literacy. In America we rank ourselves in such-and-such numbers, say, "Well, we're not so bad," you know.  This has always just seemed absurd to me.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: That's a very important issue, and it has to be a big part of the agenda of cross-language researchers.

David Boulton: Which means we must have a framework that differentiates the component learning challenges across the languages and orthographies which we can then overlay and compare the instructional invesments.  I'm more interested in the overall relationship between the human organism and this ‘code’, you know, the writing system, and the kind of suffering that children are going through, than I am in how one country competes with another country on reading scores.

But we don't have a basis to go on.  Say, if we're spending X-percentage of the GDP on literacy related instruction in a country, we can't cross-compare that expenditure versus performance with another country if we don't have a framework that details the differences of the challenges involved. It just seems absurd to use these international comparisons the way we do given how shallowly they reflect the learning challenge differences in the languages and orthographies.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes, I think that's right when comparisons are made beyond the early school years. Really, these kinds of comparisons, for the time being, are best used to reveal, you know…

David Boulton: What we don't know.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: exactly,.

David Boulton: Yeah. They kind of tell us what we don't know rather than what we do know.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: But yet, the politicians are running amuck with them as if they tell us something important about what we do know. Okay. Well, let's not get lost down that rabbit hole.

So what else can we say at the oral language level of what's differentiating the challenges before we move to orthography?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas:  As I said -- definitely the phonological structure at the word level, that certainly has an impact, and prosody and morphology, how words are formed in languages, and presumably also syntax at some higher level --

David Boulton: …where these variations in oral languages are modulating, affecting the challenge of getting through to the orthography. And what we're saying is that consistency versus variability and then complexity within variability, on these dimensions, are all part of what's regulating the challenge of taking off in literacy.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

Orthography:

David Boulton: And so now we come to the orthography -- if we're ready for it...

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: So the variations that we've been talking about so far, the oral language variations including prosody, morphology, syntax, phonology, and stress are, in general, variations that are being picked up as the child learns to differentiate/extend themselves into the language environment they're growing up in. And in that sense, it's a gradual process over many years that is really charged with meaning... because it's the core of their life of being able to communicate with the important people around them. So it's highly charged with meaning, it's a natural extension to differentiate their way into the language in their unique environment. And after -- or on top of those variations, we have another kind of variation, which is coming in at the orthography level, which doesn't have the same kind of structure to it. It's not as richly meaningful...at least not initially. It's not as natural and engaging as another human being. And the kinds of confusions that are in it are not the consequence of the co-evolution of language and culture working out these variations in the oral language structure.  They're consequences of an entirely different order, having more to do with technology and negligence and historical accident.  So it's an entirely different field to have to function in.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Uh-huh.

David Boulton: And these correspondences, these differences in orthography, exacerbate all the other challenges.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: Okay. So what else are the features of orthography that you think are most important to understand? What are the attributes of orthography that result in different processing challenges? And, apart from that, what else can you say about the orthographic depth hypothesis?  Let's just go in that direction.

Differences in Orthographies:

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Okay. Well, within alphabetic writing systems the factor that distinguishes the transparent ones from the deep or opaque systems is the inconsistency in the mapping between letters and phonemes.  The extent to which a language allows multiple correspondences from print to sound, and from sound to print, is what makes it more or less opaque, more or less ambiguous, and makes it more or less difficult to learn, at least in the fundamental coding aspects of it.

So the extent to which an orthography allows multiple correspondences is one thing. Another factor would be just the number of units that it uses as core functional units -- the elements that are allowed to combine in the orthography.  Within alphabetic orthographies, that's actually quite similar. There is variation between languages, but it's nothing like the variation that you get between, let's say, the graphemes in English and the characters in Chinese.

David Boulton: Because it's based on combinatoric assembly rather than isolated representations.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: What I want to do now is to talk about the research that you've done, and the research that you're aware of and have commented upon that speaks to the correlation between orthographic depth and reading difficulties in general, and then specifically in English.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Do you want me to go over the concept of the orthographic depth hypothesis?

David Boulton: Yes, please.

The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis:

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Okay. The initial version of this theory made the basic claim that the depth of the orthography affects the kinds of processes that people will rely on in recognizing words. These effects can be manifested in different ways, but in fact, probably the way that the orthography affects processing is subconscious, not obvious to the reader. It’s important to know the theory was devised to account for skilled reading, and between-language differences in skilled reading. It wasn't really a developmental theory. 

David Boulton: Okay.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Ideas about how orthographic depth might affect the processing depends on the kind of theoretical perspective that one has. The dual-route model, for example, assumes that there are at least two, and maybe three, possible pathways that can be adopted to recognize words. One pathway is the phonological pathway, in which the reader sees a string of letters that make up a word and actually tries to serially decode that word. So, every letter’s sound correspondence is activated, those sounds  are assembled, and only then is the word recognized. So phonology, in this phonological assembly route, is the mediating factor to recognition.

David Boulton: So the code is cuing the assembly of sound.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes. And the other routes are more direct routes that actually bypass phonology in the recognition process. Phonology is activated after the fact. For example, one of the routes goes by a semantic path. So if you saw the string of letters for which you could not easily compute the phonology on a letter-by-letter basis, you could first access its meaning, recognize it, and only after the word had been recognized would you produce some sort of output phonology, a pronunciation for that word.

David Boulton: And here again it's critical to remember your caveat in the beginning, that this wasn't so much developmental as explaining how a good reader reads, yeah?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Very much so.

David Boulton: Because in the developmental phase, you couldn't do the latter part of the dual-route you just talked about, as well, obviously.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Quite.

David Boulton: Okay. So when you talk about children that are struggling to learn to read, the dual-route hypothesis is less relevant than it is to describing what's happening to somebody who's a more developed reader?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes. The phonological assembly route is definitely the more relevant one for beginners.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Well, there are arguments about what poor older readers do. There are claims that we have subtypes of people with dyslexia, for example and some actually tend to rely on that assembly route, even when it isn't efficient to do so. And so they tend to laboriously decode letter by letter and produce sounds from which to try to recognize words. This is sometimes efficient and sometimes not. Whereas other types of people with dyslexia, presumably, are quite good at memorizing these whole word patterns and pronunciation correspondences, they're what you might call whole word readers. But if you give them a non-word to read or a low frequency word, then their reading falls apart because they can't actually rely on that phonological assembly route.

David Boulton: Yes, as was borne out with the fourth grade ceiling crash that happened to children who were taught by whole language methods in the U.S, particularly in California. Okay. So I think we're tracking. I didn't mean to distract you. I just wanted to make sure we grounded that point really well.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes. But in terms of language differences, the claim of the dual-route theory, was that if you're a reader of a consistent orthography, a transparent one, then you would really only ever need to develop that phonological assembly route and you would never have any incentive to try to recognize words directly as wholes, and to access their meaning before you actually tried to access that pronunciation. Whereas if you were a reader of a system like English, for example, that alternative would be a very efficient way for you to recognize irregular words and exception words in the language. That was the one explanation -- the dual route explanation -- of what might account for differences between how readers of different orthographies process words and recognize words.

David Boulton: You could say that for many readers the process starts off as the phonologically oriented approach, and it is through that that they develop the whole word recognition.  Once they've identified a word a sufficient number of times they recognize it as a whole, but not because they were trained to recognize the word as a whole in isolation, but because they learned to work it out.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: So, ultimately the phonological route process primes the process of being able to recognize whole words and then transcends the sound loop.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes. That's one possible explanation. But in fact, there are other theories that argue that even when you learn to read these irregular words very accurately, you're actually always going through phonology.

The Strong Phonological Theory:

So phonology is always the mediating factor. I’m quite partial to Ram Frost’s theory, called the Strong Phonological Theory.  He argues that it really doesn't matter which orthography you're reading -- at least in alphabetic systems -- you're always trying to compute phonology first.  Your default strategy or process is to try to map phonology to the orthography, and, then through that, recognize the word. But what matters, or how depth affects that process, is in how effective that output is. So, if you're reading a transparent orthography, the phonology first strategy will work quite efficiently.  You can process on a grapheme or letter-by-letter basis, let's say, map letters to phonemes, and produce a quite well specified, accurate representation of that target word.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: If you're an English reader, for example, then chances are that quite often what you come up with through the phonological process will only be partially accurate. It will approximate the target, but it won't fully specify the word. Once you've computed, to some point, a phonological representation, then you need to access the other things you know about the word, or the possible words, such as the meaning of the word, or the spelling of a word, and so on.

David Boulton: So it's not so exclusive a route, it's kind of tickling the co-implication of other parallel possible ways of recognizing the word that all converge into something that results in word recognition.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes. And Frost is arguing that the default strategy -- the thing that you need to do as your eyes spot a word -- is to initially try to figure out a pronunciation, or a phonological representation, and then your other bits of knowledge about words and the language come in to aid that process, and that is determined by the orthographic depth.

David Boulton: Right. Good. That's a good and helpful frame.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yeah, I think that's a very plausible explanation. I guess I should add that he also argues that in the transparent orthographies, you can quite reliably depend on phoneme/grapheme correspondences to access phonological representations. Whereas, in less consistent orthographies you might be prone to learn to compute larger-sized units – or grain sizes -- of phonology to orthography mapping. So that's one of the between-language differences.

David Boulton: So now we're talking about recognizing the distinct sounds associated with letter cluster rather than individual letters.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

English Orthography:

David Boulton: And this is particularly true in the case of English, where the orthography -- where the number of letters is insufficient to represent the number of phonemes... and they have to be pair-bonded in idiosyncratic ways in order to cover the range of sounds.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: That's it.

David Boulton: Good. So coming at this from the perspective that most interests me, the reading researchers I've talked to agree that a marked quality of struggling readers is the hesitant start/stop labored approach to working out word recognition. When you deconstruct what's involved in that labor, in that hesitating, starting-stopping process that seems to characterize so many struggling readers, it seems as if they're occupied with working out the correspondence between letters and sounds. And therefore we can say that the orthography is, from a pure processing work load point of view, less efficient and it's creating more brain work and processing power dissipation in order to get to recognition which is radiating through the entire process of speed, fluency, and comprehension -- everything is sort of stuttering over the core processing delays and the inefficiencies associated with the difficulty of working out the correspondences.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: That's right. One of the central difficulties of becoming a fluent reader in English, certainly, is learning not just the core correspondences of canonical, initial letter/sound correspondences, but all of those other variations that the language allows.

And another skill that poor readers have difficulty with, and that good readers possess is this ability to actually notice, or I should say be senstitive to the larger context of the individual letters. I mean, in the sense of being able to make use of the statistical distributional properties -- the knowledge that you have about what kinds of letters tend to co-occur where and with what other letters in specifying a pronunciation. And poor readers tend to be less aware of those kinds of distributional properties.

David Boulton: Right. And this interacts all the way down into the kinds of interactive compensational models that say that the more time the brain is spending on the lower level decoding, the less bandwidth there is for the comprehension overall that could be tickling the reduction of confusion at a decoding level.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

Paradigm Inertia:

David Boulton: We have developed some explanations based on the history of orthography, and the various attempts to try to reform the code (to bring the spelling and sound into better correspondences) as well as the stink and smear put on people who tried to reform the code and therefore the reluctance in the community to…. I've actually had conversations with some of the leading scientists in this field who openly own up to the fact that they're afraid to talk about the inconsistencies in the code and its relationship to learning to read for fear that it leads to the whole language argument.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Oh, I see.

David Boulton: So there's actually a political, social, psychological bias in the scientific community against a kind of hard science exploration -- at least in some of the circles I've talked to – into the correspondence between orthographic inconsistency/variability/context-dependency, and reading difficulties.  They don't want to go there because the assumption is, well, the only thing you could do that would change that would be to change the code, and we're not going to do that, so therefore we shouldn't be thinking about it. This is bizarre considering how many people are affected by this.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: True. But I guess there's also the argument that it's not really entirely predictable what changes, such as simplifying the code, would do or what effect that would have -- whether that would complicate learning in other ways.

David Boulton: But now you get strategy specific, right?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Hmm.

David Boulton: You'd have to test out any particular strategy. I'm not trying to advocate simplifying the code, in the sense of changing the alphabet or changing the spelling.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Right.

David Boulton: I just think that it's kind of the Sufi Key Story to not be looking harder at the dimensions that are exacerbating the core challenge of reading that are a consequence of the orthography, which is a technology, which has had an entirely different process of development than the evolution of language… and as I said, the thing that really concerns me is that the context of the experience of struggling readers is such that they perceive their struggle as reflection of something wrong with themselves. And in order to blow up that myth, I think we've got to take on the code in a different way.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Hmm, yes.

David Boulton: All right. So having said that, tell me about the comparative language research and the literacy learning research that you're aware of and have done, that shines a light from a more empirical, even if statistical, point of view on how variations in the complexity and depth of orthography relate to the difficulty of learning to read.

Back to Cross Linguistic Comparisons:

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Well, in the context of orthographic depth and processing differences and so on, a few studies have been done quite recently comparing German and English speaking children. These studies are actually quite nice because the languages have a common root, so you can find quite a number of these cognate words, so words that have the same spelling and the same meaning, and very similar pronunciations.

David Boulton: Because they share the same Latin substructure?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: A common Germanic origin, yes.

David Boulton: Okay.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: These studies have been done most recently by Jo Zeigler and Usha Goswami and their colleagues. They have shown that when you ask English speaking children and German speaking children to read the same words, essentially, the German speaking children tend to be more tied to the phonological decoding, the phonological assembly strategy or something akin to that, and that they seem to be processing on a phoneme/grapheme level; whereas English speakers, tend to show evidence of processing larger units. So there is some indication that even among children -- although how early those differences actually kick in is not really clearly established yet, but probably by second or third grade -- you do get these processing differences. So by second or third grade, good English readers tend to be able to process print in larger chunks.

David Boulton: Uh-huh.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: And that seems to be beneficial. In a recent study by Zeigler and his colleagues where they included dyslexic samples, they found that the English dyslexic kids were, of course, relatively delayed, they were slower readers, and so on. But they tended to behave like the German readers. So they weren't showing effects of this kind of larger unit processing; they were still very much affected by how many letters comprised the word, and the more letters, the slower and less accurate they became.

David Boulton: So somehow they couldn't get past the phonological process to start to consider additional routes of parallel processing to tickle that word recognition?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Possibly, or they just couldn't begin to compute, even at a sublexical level, they could not progress to the stage of mapping larger orthographic units to larger phonological units.

David Boulton: Uh-huh.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: They just stayed at this -- what we were talking about earlier, this sort of letter-by-letter and sound-by-sound process, where they couldn't yet access the other kinds of higher level information that might help them to recognize the word. So that's just one bit of evidence.

Then, another issue pertains to the typical severity of impairments in dyslexia in different languages.  One lay belief is that children with dyslexia learning transparent orthographies must have “smaller” or less severe difficulties than children learning deep orthographies.  Well, my own work comparing Czech and English speaking children, dyslexic groups and controls, shows that within their own language context -- for example, Czech dyslexic children -- they show very large delays, relative to typical readers in their language group.  However, their overall performance tends to be higher relative to English speaking children if you give them the same types of tasks -- word level decoding, word level spelling, and phonological awareness tasks, and so on. So there does seem to be some sort of additional cost that English poor readers suffer over and above whatever they would suffer if they were functioning in a transparent system.  But relative to the norm in their language, the deficits of Czech and English children with dyslexia are basically equally severe.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: So they show very similar patterns. Their profiles actually aren't all that different. But there is this absolute difference between learners of deep and transparent writing systems, in just the level of performance that they reach with the orthography at a particular age.

David Boulton: Which is because of the different challenges the orthography represents.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: I would say that has to be true.

David Boulton: I mean, clearly the work involved in solving for word recognition, the more complex the orthography, the more work involved. And the work takes time.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: And time we don't have much of if we're going to get to word recognition at a rate sufficient to sustain the flow of meaning. So, all these things are connected.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes, I'd say so.

David Boulton: So what haven't we talked about that you think would be helpful for people to understand about how the depth of orthography exacerbates the challenges inherent in this unnatural process called reading?

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: I'm not sure how much we haven't covered. I think we've covered quite a lot. But one thing you asked me was what I thought teachers or other practitioners might not really appreciate or quite understand about the effects of orthographic depth. And I'd say there are probably several things. One that I encounter even now with teacher friends and laypeople, certainly, is this idea that if you're learning a more inconsistent system, then you must rely on different cognitive processes. For example, many people believe that readers of inconsistent systems probably rely more on visual processes, and that reading is more about visual memory and visual discrimination, and so on, and relies less on the linguistic structures. So I guess that would be an important thing to emphasize.  Based on all the evidence we have so far, we really have very little evidence that even in deep alphabetic orthographies people rely on more visual skills, so let's say memorization of whole words, more than readers of transparent orthographies. If you look at how well things like visual memory or visual discrimination tasks correlate with word reading across languages, you certainly don't find stronger correlations, let's say with English readers than you might with Czech readers. In fact, they tend not to correlate, or only very weakly, anyway. Whereas what we do find is that when you look at the role of phonological processing, morphological processing, these language-based processes, those do correlate, and they do account for variability in people's performance. The picture might be slightly different for reading nonalphabetic systems, like Chinese, in that visual processes might play a stronger role; that’s what very recent work by people like Charles Perfetti and his colleagues is showing.  But, even in Chinese, the phonological component is a critical component of word recognition.

David Boulton: That's great. That's really an important addition. And building on that, it seems that the kind of cognitive exercise, and the kind of cognitive infrastructure in terms of the number of different processes that have to concur and co-implicate, that the exercise environment of a deeper orthography and what that brings about, in terms of cognitive processing kind of infrastructure, would be different.

All right. Well, this is wonderful. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Me too.

The Attention Drain of Concurrent Emotions:

David Boulton: And it fits into a nice slot in the overall system that we're working on, I mean, our main concern is to help detoxify the challenge. Just as attentional bandwidth is so critical to all this processing... when somebody is going into self consciousness about their emotional response to the confusion here it is bandwidth draining, big time.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes.

David Boulton: So from our point of view, a lot of struggling readers, once they get to a point where they blame themselves for the confusion, they start to have an emotional aversion to this. The emotional aversion is now exacerbating the challenge to such a degree that it is as critical as the cognitive dimensions and the orthographic dimensions in terms of the things we've got to deal with if we're going to help them.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Yes, very true. It’s about being aware of all the components that we can make explicit to them, if they can't come by them on their own, and figuring out which ones are the most teachable and most effective components that might help them.

David Boulton: Right. We've got to become neurologically very efficient in how we unfold the challenges. And we've got to reframe the context of the confusion and the experience of the confusion so as to reduce their propensity to go into self-blame and develop a cognitive shunting concurrent emotional process.

Okay. Well, we're up on our time. And I'm so grateful to you.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: Thank you.

David Boulton: Thank you so much for your time.

Dr. Marketa Caravolas: It was a pleasure.

Special thanks to volunteer Melanie Miller for her help in editing this interview.