David Boulton: I’d like to start with a thumbnail of who you are and how it is that you came to this space of learning. How has your personal path provided you the opportunity to learn what you have learned?

Dr. Charles Perfetti: I’m a psycholinguist by training. I got my Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at the University of Michigan and I was part of a growing interest represented by two institutions on campus about language. I was interested in the basic processes of language, the nature of language, and at that point it didn’t involve reading very much. After I came to the University of Pittsburgh I continued to work on what we call straight psycholinguistic research questions. Then I got interested in reading and I can almost pinpoint the date; I remember I was driving back with a couple of graduate students from a convention in Philadelphia. There were some issues raised in front of these papers about reading and we starting talking about why some children were having trouble in reading, why some people were better at reading than others.

We started talking about different alternatives. Because we were psycholinguistic researchers, my students and I started talking about things that were kind of traditional concerns of psycholinguistics, like syntax. Maybe poor readers were having trouble with syntax; maybe poor readers were having trouble with semantics, and so on.

I remember reasonably distinctively saying, I think it’s the wrong level; think about what reading is compared to language. Reading is about decoding words so that you can then use your language processes. So, before we start doing studies, which was what was really in the air that day, what kind of studies we might do because we promised to address the problem, we ought to start by looking at word reading because that’s where spoken language and literacy are most different. Once you’re able to read words then presumably you’re engaging in language processes and then understanding spoken language and understanding written language are much more similar. Not identical, but at least similar.

I guess that was in the late 1970’s, 1980 or so, maybe a couple years before then… but we took it to heart. We got back to Pittsburgh and we started doing studies on reading. I did a whole lot of them and the force of them was to demonstrate to my satisfaction that if you looked at two kids in elementary school, beyond the point where beginning reading is taught, (so I am talking about third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade), and one is a better comprehender than the other by some assessment, my prediction was that you’re also going to find that the one who is the better comprehender is better at identifying printed words. And that’s what we found. We had lots of studies that demonstrated that. We published some and put them together in a book in 1985 called Reading Ability. That was my contribution to this problem and my argument.

Word Recognition and Comprehension:

Dr. Charles Perfetti: At that point it was only about comprehension. I was just struck by the fact that kids who had trouble understanding what they read, if you looked at them closely, they had trouble reading words. They either took longer or sometimes we asked the teacher to identify kids having problems and she’d say ‘Well, this kid reads words just fine but he can’t understand what he reads.’ We’d say okay and we’d go test him and we’d find out that, well yes, if you weren’t looking really closely, if you had him read a list of words he would read most of the words accurately. But if you measured the time it was taking him or the difficulty he was having, you almost always found that there was some problem in word reading.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: That’s right and that was the heart of that argument back then. I think the argument has become fairly widely accepted as being a correct argument. I think we have a better understanding, although I continue to be disappointed that researchers don’t look hard at word level processing in this new area of research called specific comprehension deficits. That’s a phrase that has been coined by several researchers. The general idea is that they’re observing children who, in fact, are fine at word decoding and have as their only problem comprehension.

I think that hypothesis is correct. That is, the hypothesis that there are children who have as their main problem something else in the language system than reading words. But I am still a little disappointed when I look at how people look at word identification. So, I think what has happened is people took my argument seriously enough, and the argument of others, that they assess decoding now before they do a study on some other variable. But they still tend not to measure efficiency and speed.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Well yeah, I think that’s right. At the same time, I want to acknowledge another angle to this, which is that although there are now training studies you can point to that show that if you increase decoding word efficiency you get comprehension gains, I think one has to acknowledge that’s there’s likely to be a reciprocal relationship here. As you get so that you can comprehend what you read you are going to strengthen your word identification processes.

I mentioned the training studies because those do break through what are otherwise only correlations. That is, generally speaking, a correlation between word decoding and comprehension. You break through that in a training study by showing that if you improve someone’s word decoding you improve the comprehension. There are now a few studies that have shown that that can happen, although I am also impressed by the fact that it’s apparently not so easy to do. Some of the training studies do not work so well; it has to be done right and so on.

But I think that underlying this is an important idea that the reading system, which does depend very much on the spoken language system, its components can develop in tandem and can mutually reinforce each other. So, as you comprehend better I actually think you do get the experience of successful comprehension in strengthening word identification processes; at least on the words that you are reading while you are comprehending what you’re reading. Although I originally argued very strongly for this causal relation, and I still think that’s correct, I do think we need to understand that it’s a little unclear.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yes, I think that’s a fundamentally correct way to understand it. If you don’t understand it that way I think you’re going to maybe go down some garden path. Getting that first phase to a high level so that you’re able to use the language system - if you’re struggling with that mapping process then you’re not able to engage the language system that you have and that you would otherwise use perfectly well with the spoken language.

David Boulton: Right, and the difficulty for a lot of children entering this is that their earlier language learning environments didn’t sufficiently exercise their brain’s ability to make the kind of sound distinctions and/or make them at the frequency necessary for this to work for them. When they encounter the kind of challenges associated with building this part of the brain so it can generate the simulated word recognitions from this code, then they’re ill prepared to do it.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yeah, none of us handle failure very well. If you’re put in a situation where you’re not performing a task there are going to be negative emotions and there’s going to be avoidance. There’s going to be a spiral of negativity that’s counter productive and that’s a big part of it.

David Boulton: Wouldn’t you also say, particularly with the English code, that there’s really nothing else a child ever does before that point that is like having to assemble a virtual language experience from a technology?

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Well, … I might have missed your point about what you mean by technology, but I’ll put it in my own words and you can decide whether it connects with what you’re saying.

If not unique, I do think it’s one of a small class of experiences in which there is a radical shift away from being in a tremendously easy, supportive environment. What I mean by supportive is that your attempts to communicate are almost always supported. If you say something, someone understands you. If they say something, you understand them. One of the reasons is that in childhood environments all of these communications take place in contexts that over-determine what’s being communicated. They tend to be conversations about the here and the now; they tend to be about objects from the environment they’re happening in.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yeah, and the child has not been forced to draw attention to form. With reading, suddenly you’ve got to tend to form for the first time and what counts is that this letter is here rather than that letter. The letter itself has no meaning. It associates with a spoken language unit that also has no meaning, a phoneme.

So, this attention to form kind of pulls the rug out from under you, which is why I think some people want to argue that you ought to make it very meaningful from the beginning so the child can use the kind of support that he’s used to in spoken language.

David Boulton: Which is perfectly legitimate as long as we don’t fail to recognize that we’re talking about something that is different than the way our meaning- oriented natures work in nature.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Well yes, and that there is a specific learning question here. The question is the child has to learn something. What does he have to learn? He has to learn the written forms of his language and how they map onto spoken form.

I used the word forms twice there. He doesn’t have to learn new meanings, at least not generally; certainly when you do get skilled at reading you learn new meanings. But the basic thing you have to learn in reading is form mapping. And you try to arrange things so that meaning can help support you in this effort. But at the heart of it you’ve got to learn the forms.

David Boulton: Right, and this has to result in a module in the brain that’s processing and translating this form into sound representations faster than you can think about it.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yes, that’s right. The brain will develop neuro-structures that generally are adapted from other uses. There’s no reason to think the brain has any module in it in the beginning for reading. Written language is too recent a human development to have allowed brain evolution to accommodate it. So, I think this is another aspect of the difficulty.

Now, once that part is done and once you connect these visual form perceptions with your language, that part, speaking loosely, could be considered a module. The connections are pretty constrained from visual areas to temporal and frontal areas that together seem to support rapid word identification and so some of those areas are shared with spoken language as well. So, at that point once you’ve got the visual forms, and not just the forms but mapping them to the spoken language forms, then you can talk about a system acquiring some modularity; behaving as if it’s a highly skilled system using sub-brain networks that are in some sense specialized for reading. But in the beginning you have to recruit other resources and apparently that can be a problem.

David Boulton: Those resources would also perform, following along your trajectory here, the differentiation inside of word sounds in a way that’s otherwise artificial and that is unique to the kind of distinctions in word sounds necessary to map to the code. So, it’s not the same kind of attention to sound differences that are necessary to participate in oral conversation.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Exactly. Right, and so again, it’s attention to form, a much more analytic form, little pieces of form that in themselves have no meaning.

David Boulton: So, in a natural setting we’re more attuned to seeing the difference in larger wholes rather than in making differences between such small particulars.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Right. I think that’s a big part of it.

David Boulton: That’s why overall what were trying to get a handle on is whether we can describe this lower part of the process as if its job is to simulate a stream of language inputs to comprehension and fabricate that simulation according to the way the brain has learned to process the code through the visual and auditory modalities, which is providing it with information and instruction.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: I like that. I think that’s a good way to describe it. I find that very compatible with the way I think about it. Those are your words, not mine, but I think that’s a good way of thinking about it.

David Boulton: There are two things that plug in here that I want to explore with you.

One has to do with assembly processing time. It’s clear in talking to the phonological side of neuroscience that fuzzy representations in the phonemic, phonological dimensions require more processing time to disambiguate and cause a processing stutter – again purely on the auditory processing side.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Right.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yes, I think that’s right. Alan Lesgold and I developed an idea that I put in my 1985 book about this. We called it code asynchrony; the idea being that orthographic phonological and semantic codes that had high levels of skill come out all at once. And in low levels of skill there can be an asynchrony in a sense that you’re getting some of the graphemes and some of the phonemes but you’re not getting the whole thing yet and things get all out of phase. Instead of mutually strengthening each other so that at the end of the decoding episode you have a stronger word representation that’s accessible by orthography, you’ve got bits and pieces and only partial success.

Now what you’re adding to that idea. I think specifically what you are saying is if the phonological space is too fuzzy because the letter hasn’t made phonological differentiations that turn out to be relevant for English vocabulary then that’s going to be an additional problem. There’s not going to be a differentiated phonological coding that comes out of any given word reading event. Then the question is how that develops.

Some of the pre-literacy research on children’s development of spoken language, I think, is suggesting that fuzzy phonological representations are normal and characteristic of early language development and that they become less fuzzy, more differentiated and more articulate only in response to increasing demands in the linguistic environment, which usually amounts to having to learn a new word or having to distinguish a new word from one that you already have and that can force you to make new phonological distinctions.

I think the fuzziness is normal and I think what can happen with reading when things are working well is that getting good feedback, either internally generated or externally, on a decoding attempt can have the same effect, that is forcing phonological differentiation. So, you can say an approximation. It doesn’t map onto anything that you know and so you either get feedback that it’s actually this word rather than that word or that the word that you’re trying to decode is novel and has its form and that produces new phonological representation. That, I think, is an interesting possibility for understanding this in general.

David Boulton: Right. So, they’re feeding into each other. I think at one level we’re a fuzzy processor in a myriad of ways.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: I think you’re speaking formally, a formal idea of fuzziness, which is probabilistic category membership. That’s the formal sense.

David Boulton: Yes, but where I’m going with this is that to the extent that the time it takes to get from elemental recognition through disambiguation, through to an approximated word to move to recognition with… if that assembly takes too long then there’s a stutter that radiates through everything.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Right, because it turns out you’re actually not assembling a unit that you can then use as a representation. Things are too disconnected.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: I talked about this in terms of the theory of what it is that children learn to represent when they learn to read, something I called specificity representation. So that before acquiring specificity as a characteristic representation, I would put in these formal terms: it has variables instead of constants. Instead of always having this sound, it has sort of something like this sound or something like that sound.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yeah, maybe. I haven’t thought about that. That’s an interesting way. Okay.

The interview you are reading continues after the following message...  (skip message) Share this:   Tweet        Please sign up to receive notices when we post new articles, videos, and updates. Sent by Google's FeedBurner. Easily unsubscribe at any time. Never any spam. Welcome to the Children of the Code Project, a social education project intended to help catalyze and resource a transformation in our society's understanding of 'what is at stake' and 'what is involved' in learning to read. The transcript you are reading is one of over 160 interviews conducted for the Children of the Code documentary series which is being produced for television, DVD, and the web.   EXCERPTS FROM THE 100+ VIDEOS (4+ HOURS) OF VIDEOS AVAILABLE ON OUR DVDS The better your understanding of the challenges involved in learning to read  the better your ability to help children through those challenges. Our allegiance is to the health of our children's learning. 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Reid Lyon  Past Director, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dr. Keith Stanovich  Canadian Chair of Cognitive Science, University of Toronto Dr. Mel Levine Co-Chair and Co-Founder, All Kinds of Minds; Author: A Mind at a Time, The Myth of Laziness & Ready or Not Here Life Comes Dr. Alex Granzin  School District Psychologist, Past President, Oregon School Psychologists Association  Dr. James J. Heckman Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences 2000; Lead Author: The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children Siegfried Engelmann Professor of Instructional Research, University of Oregon; Creator of Direct Instruction Dr. Timothy Shanahan President (2006) International Reading Association, Chair National Early Literacy Panel, Member National Reading Panel Nancy Hennessy  President, 2003-2005, International Dyslexia Association Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams Senior Scientist, Soliloquy Learning, Author: Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print Dr. Michael Merzenich Chair of Otolaryngology, Integrative Neurosciences, UCSF;  Member National Academy of Sciences Dr. Maryanne Wolf Director, Center for Reading & Language Research; Professor of Child Development, Tufts University Dr. Todd Risley  Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Alaska, Co-author: Meaningful Differences Dr. Sally Shaywitz  Neuroscientist, Department of Pediatrics, Yale University, Author: Overcoming Dyslexia Dr. Louisa Moats  Director, Professional Development and Research Initiatives, Sopris West Educational Services Dr. Zvia Breznitz Professor, Neuropsychology of Reading & Dyslexia, University of Haifa, Israel  Rick Lavoie Learning Disabilities Specialist, Creator: How Difficult Can This Be?: The F.A.T. City Workshop & Last One Picked, First One Picked On Dr.Charles Perfetti Professor, Psychology & Linguistics; Senior Scientist and Associate Director, Learning R&D Center, U. of Pittsburgh, PA Arthur J. Rolnick Senior V.P. & Dir. of Research,  Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis;  Co- Author: The Economics of Early Childhood Development   Dr. Richard Venezky  Professor, Educational Studies, Computer and  Information Sciences, and Linguistics, University of Delaware Dr. Keith Rayner  Distinguished  Professor, University of Massachusetts, Author: Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing Dr. Paula Tallal  Professor of Neuroscience, Co-Director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University Dr.John Searle  Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California-Berkeley, Author: Mind, A Brief Introduction Dr.Mark T. Greenberg Director, Prevention Research Center, Penn State Dept. of Human Development & Family Studies; CASEL Leadership Team Dr. Terrence Deacon  Professor of Biological Anthropology and Linguistics at University of California- Berkeley Chris Doherty  Ex-Program Director, National Reading First Program, U.S. Department of Education Dr. Christof Koch Professor of Computation and Neural Systems,  Caltech - Author: The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach Dr. Guy Deutscher Professor of Languages and Cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia, Holland; Author: Unfolding Language Dr. David Abram Cultural Ecologist and Philosopher; Author: The Spell of the Sensuous Robert Wedgeworth  President, ProLiteracy, World's Largest Literacy Organization Dr. Marketa Caravolas Director, Bangor Dyslexia Unit, Bangor University, Author: International Report on Literacy Research Dr. Erik Hanushek Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University Dr. Peter Leone  Director, National Center on Education, Disability and Juvenile Justice Dr. Thomas Cable  Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin, Co-author: A History of the English Language Pat Lindamood and Nanci Bell  Principal Scientists, Founders, Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes Dr. Anne Cunningham  Director, Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education, Graduate School of Education at University of California-Berkeley Dr. Donald L. Nathanson  Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College, Director of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute  Dr.Johanna Drucker  Chair of Media Studies, University of Virginia, Author: The Alphabetic Labyrinth John H. Fisher  Medievalist, Leading authority on the development of the written English language, Author: The Emergence of Standard English Dr. Malcolm Richardson   Chair, Dept. of English, Louisiana State University; Research: The Textual Awakening of the English Middle Classes   James Wendorf  Executive Director, National Center for Learning Disabilities Leonard Shlain Physician; Best-Selling Author: The Alphabet vs. The Goddess Robert Sweet  Co-Founder, National Right to Read Foundation FULL LIST OF COMPLETED INTERVIEWS If you appreciate this interview and the work of the Children of the Code project please support our work. In addition to financial contributions, another way to help us is to share your thoughts with us. 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There’s something special and unique about learning a ‘code’, which is an artifact, a technology, something that we, not nature, created. If you look at the history of how the particular English writing system came to be in the condition that it’s in, it’s pretty clear that it was a series of accidents that have resulted in a code system with a number of layers of complex ambiguity. It requires a lot of processing power to resolve that ambiguity and the brain has precious little time to do it before the whole assembly process is going to stutter up the flow to comprehension processes.

David Boulton: Right. It still maps to meaning through phonological representation.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: At the same time, I think in Chinese what seems to be the case is that you get simultaneous mappings to meaning and phonology, but you don’t just eliminate the phonology. If you draw a diagram to phonology the link looks like it ought to be a vestige or something. It’s not logically necessary; you could imagine doing without.

But the fact is no matter what your language, when people read they have learned to use their language. Reading goes through the language system no matter how it’s written.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yeah, that’s a good point. Did Reid come up with anything?

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Well, right, but the first part of what you’re saying is we’ll understand that better if we really understand the challenges that each system is providing, and I think that’s true. There’s quite a bit of work now and the work is not, from my point of view, comparing which country has kids making higher achievement but rather exactly what you said, how are these, in staying in the family of alphabetic orthography, how are these orthographic variations playing out in the challenges that the child is facing in learning to read? There are some very fascinating differences that have been observed. People are beginning to try to make it rather systematic, basically in terms of how easy it is to assemble the phonological representation.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: I think that’s right and so that’s created this kind of variability through alphabetic systems. Someday you might enjoy, and maybe you know this story already, but to take a look at Korean, what alphabet was invented. Korean is written in alphabet, it used to be written in Chinese characters that didn’t fit the language well and they invented the perfect alphabet in the 1500's. They’ve made some changes since then and actually the direction has made it somewhat less perfect, but it was perfection.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Don’t have the comparisons.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Well, I think it hasn’t always been successful where it’s been tried. They did it in the Netherlands and had relatively small changes but it’s caused a new set of problems, actually. So, trying to make things a little bit more consistent actually winds up causing other problems.

First of all, writing is very conservative and as far as popular perception is concerned people don’t really want it changed, so it’s very resistant. But the interesting thing is that it’s only when you start to make the changes that you realize there’s a cost for the changes as well as what you’re trading off for. You’re trading off something for something else.

David Boulton: Right. Charles Hockett, a linguist you’ve probably encountered before, once said, "People are more likely to change their religion than change their writing system". It certainly seems true.

I’m really enjoying our conversation and we’ve just scratched the surface, obviously. I am glad we’ve talked about the time precariousness of the processing happening in this language simulation module in terms of the assembly and disambiguating the letters and sounds and so forth.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Yes, that sounds like a right analysis. It’s devastating. It’s a double whammy. The trouble with decoding is one whammy and because you have trouble you have a response that essentially makes it harder to learn what you need to learn.

David Boulton: Yeah. More on this, I hope, when we get together face to face.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: Okay.

Dr. Charles Perfetti: You’re very welcome. Nice talking to you.

Special thanks to volunteer Lauren Groover for transcribing this interview.

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Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst  Director, Institute of Education Sciences, Assistant Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education Dr. Jack Shonkoff Chair, The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child; Co-Editor: From Neurons to Neighborhoods Siegfried Engelmann Professor of Instructional Research, University of Oregon; Creator of Direct Instruction   Dr. Edward Kame'enui Commissioner for Special Education Research, U.S. Department of Education; Director, IDEA, University  of Oregon Dr. G. Reid Lyon  Past Director, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dr. Keith Stanovich  Canadian Chair of Cognitive Science, University of Toronto Dr. Mel Levine Co-Chair and Co-Founder, All Kinds of Minds; Author: A Mind at a Time, The Myth of Laziness & Ready or Not Here Life Comes Dr. Alex Granzin  School District Psychologist, Past President, Oregon School Psychologists Association  Dr. James J. Heckman Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences 2000; Lead Author: The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children Dr. Timothy Shanahan President (2006) International Reading Association, Chair National Early Literacy Panel, Member National Reading Panel Nancy Hennessy  President, 2003-2005, International Dyslexia Association Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams Senior Scientist, Soliloquy Learning, Author: Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print Dr. Michael Merzenich Chair of Otolaryngology, Integrative Neurosciences, UCSF;  Member National Academy of Sciences Dr. Maryanne Wolf Director, Center for Reading & Language Research; Professor of Child Development, Tufts University Dr. Todd Risley  Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Alaska, Co-author: Meaningful Differences Dr. Sally Shaywitz  Neuroscientist, Department of Pediatrics, Yale University, Author: Overcoming Dyslexia Dr. Louisa Moats  Director, Professional Development and Research Initiatives, Sopris West Educational Services Dr. Zvia Breznitz Professor, Neuropsychology of Reading & Dyslexia, University of Haifa, Israel  Rick Lavoie Learning Disabilities Specialist, Creator: How Difficult Can This Be?: The F.A.T. City Workshop & Last One Picked, First One Picked On Dr.Charles Perfetti Professor, Psychology & Linguistics; Senior Scientist and Associate Director, Learning R&D Center, U. of Pittsburgh, PA Arthur J. Rolnick Senior V.P. & Dir. of Research,  Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis;  Co- Author: The Economics of Early Childhood Development   Dr. Richard Venezky  Professor, Educational Studies, Computer and  Information Sciences, and Linguistics, University of Delaware Dr. Keith Rayner  Distinguished  Professor, University of Massachusetts, Author: Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing Dr. Paula Tallal  Professor of Neuroscience, Co-Director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University Dr.John Searle  Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California-Berkeley, Author: Mind, A Brief Introduction Dr.Mark T. 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Nathanson  Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College, Director of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute  Dr.Johanna Drucker  Chair of Media Studies, University of Virginia, Author: The Alphabetic Labyrinth John H. 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