David Boulton: Let's talk about your model of reading that we've referred to. Maybe you could describe some of the sub processors, some of the modules that are interacting here.

Dr. Keith Stanovich:  I've given you parts of it. I mean, it's the story that most people tell. Actually, I don't want to call it my model anymore. 

David Boulton: Okay.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: I'd like to call it the emerging consensus view, right? Of course, Anne has given you part of that foundational skills in phonological awareness. There's a lot to know yet in the sense that people are still hotly debating the fractionating of that skill, what units are most important at what stages. There's a lot left to be answered. But no one denies that a substrate of cognitive abilities in the phonological awareness domain is critical. Then that will get you nowhere without the basic alphabetic insight that print maps speech, and it maps, in English at least, at a fairly abstract and analytic level.

Then I saw a question of yours to somebody pointing out that we shouldn't treat that as some type of zero/one thing, that developing orthographic knowledge is continuous. I couldn't agree more.

David Boulton: I think that the alphabetic principle can be misleading, and that we're talking about a complex disambiguation process.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: I think you're absolutely right there. Part of this is just people getting sloppy with the language, in the sense that the alphabetic insight, that there's some type of mapping here at a fairly abstract level, might be closer to discrete, but that's...

David Boulton: That's a first-step initiator to starting to learn your way into what are these correspondences.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Exactly. And then, what is the structure of this code, as you rightly point out, and the complexity of this code? Then we're talking about, yes, a long, unfolding process. Then very early in that process, I saw you talking with Anne about Matthew Effects, and very early in that process those effects start to kick in. I see that part of your interest in this series is the consequences of the acquisition of literacy. Those consequences feed back on the act of acquisition itself and they ripple out into other cognitive structures, processes and tools, like vocabulary.

David Boulton: Is it fair to say that the process of learning to read creates a cognitive processing infrastructure that wouldn't be there if we didn't, and that that cognitive processing infrastructure is a significant part of the way that we think these days?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Oh, yeah. I couldn't agree more. That's a very good characterization. That is what we started to try to capture in a program of research that call The Print Exposure Program. After I published the Matthew Effects article,  I mean, that was essentially a model that synthesized a lot of literature, but we tried to study empirically some of the effects of differential exposure to print. That's a program that I undertook with both Anne and Rich, subsequent to the Matthew paper which was published in 1986. For about a decade we were quite involved with studies looking at the effects of print exposure.

One of the aspects of that program was in part methodological: How do you measure differences in exposure to print? Then once you've done that, how do you show print exposure as an independent contributor to cognitive growth? And we thought that we had done that in a variety of studies that illustrate your statement. Of course, we focused immediately on some of the obvious candidates, and certainly vocabulary was something we focused on a lot.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: We showed, with various correlational techniques and some longitudinal designs, that vocabulary growth was independently predicted by the amount of print exposure. I said independent because we're partialling out all of the other obvious candidates, like intelligence and measures of cognitive ability.

David Boulton: I don't know whether you saw the interview with John Fisher.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: I don't think I did.

David Boulton: He's an authority on the emergence of standard English and he makes the case, very cogently, that historically in every culture that we’ve studied vocabulary goes 'boom' when writing kicks in. There's a definite connection in the history of writing with the explosion of vocabulary that parallels and recapitulates what's happening in each individual child as they become reading enabled.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Historically, that's a great parallel because we looked at some of the individual difference literature on that. I think Anne referred you to some of the work by Hayes on lexical density, looking at the tremendous differences between print and oral. (Hayes, D. P. (1988).  Speaking and writing: Distinct patterns of word choice. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 572-585.) He basically has a program that rates the relative rarity of words. So, you put a corpus in and he has some oral transcripts from television shows and things, and hospital conversation, and then compares it to print. Then he has various statistical measures of lexical density. So, you take some arbitrary definition of a rare word, say a word ranked greater than 10,000 in the Kucera and Francis Count or ranked greater than 5,000 in the Carroll, Davies and Richman Count. If you're going to have vocabulary growth after the third grade, you've got to be exposed to a word that is rarer than that. Then he looks to see how many times words of that type appear per 1,000 words in print, the various types, and there's an astronomical difference. It's order of magnitude differences that you get.

David Boulton: It has to cross a certain threshold.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: There was a tenfold difference in print. In this work we did a lot of analyses, a lot of regression type analyses where we tried to partial out a lot of alternative candidates. In the longitudinal studies, we partialed out the auto correlation. So, we partial out the vocabulary at an earlier point in time to see if differential growth can be predicted.

In the cross-sectional studies, we partial out the obvious cognitive candidates, again, like intelligence. And again, that's really stacking the deck against our hypothesis.

David Boulton: I understand.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: It's a huge load on intelligence. So, if you have another variable that can predict vocabulary over and above intelligence, that is saying something. To use the jargon for a minute, it's deliberately causally misspecified. What we mean by that is that of course part of earlier print exposure is probably in the intelligence measure.

David Boulton: Exactly. I think that's a big point on a lot of levels.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: People don't understand how biased against our hypothesis that was. All the earlier developmental effects - some of these studies, by the way, we did were with adults.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: So, all the earlier developmental effects of print exposure, okay, tons of those effects were already in the intelligence measure. So, what do we go and do physically? We take intelligence out. Well, in sense that's robbing print exposure of some its rightful variance. Yet, still, we showed an independent beta-weight for the print's exposure measures. So we were quite excited to be able to find that.

Then with our older subjects  we of course would do things like partial out education, and again showing that the amount of reading a person does can predict vocabulary independent of the education that they've had. We studied an elderly group of people, Richard West and I. I think they had a mean age of about seventy-eight. We replicated, in that study, kind of the classic thing you show with fluid and crystallized intelligence.

Fluid intelligence drops with age. So we have our university sample and our forty-year-olds and our seventy-nine year-old. Fluid intelligence, of course, drops way off. The seventy-nine year-old is quite low. Crystallized intelligence is the vocabulary real world knowledge, declarative knowledge of the world that keeps rising across the age span. So that's the basic replication of the kind of Horn/Cattell model.

Then we add our measures of print exposure. We do a series of statistical analyses showing that the growth that you see in elderly people, the growth in crystallized intelligence is almost all due to reading. It's almost all due to individual differences in print exposure.

David Boulton: As an adjunct to the work that you were doing here, did you engage in or know anybody else that engaged in looking at the vocabulary count level of oral-language-only people whose native language had never developed a writing system?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: No. We certainly didn't do that,and I wouldn't immediately know where to send you on that one.

David Boulton: That's one of the things I'm looking for. Then the other thing is that in addition to vocabulary, did you ever get to the granularity level of being able to assess for abstraction, the capacity for abstraction, the dimensional extent of abstraction, or generalization, or some of the other things that come with learning to be an abstract processor in the ways that reading requires?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: That's an interesting question. We did several studies that started to address that and one that was published. The aspect of abstraction, and again, we'll have to talk more about exactly what we mean by it.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: We focused on, and again, this comes a bit from my interest in critical thinking, decontextualization ability.

David Boulton: Which is an inverse statement of generalization?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes. The ability to decontextualize, to stand aside from a media context and process abstractly. So again, the classic paradigm would be one of syllogistic reasoning with unbelievable conclusions. You create situations where logical validity is in conflict with the real world content of the conclusion. So, you give people a syllogism that is valid but a conclusion that is unbelievable in the real world. Or conversely, you give people a syllogism that is invalid but has a conclusion that is very congruent with world knowledge. Then you look at people's ability to deal with those types of problems in comparison to their ability to deal simply with problems that don't involve the necessity of detaching real world knowledge.

We found a small effect of print exposure on that type of ability. I say small in the sense that, I mean, it's all relative. Again, in these types of biased analyses that I'm talking about here, i.e., after partialling...

David Boulton: Removing so many variables that it's biasing against you seeing anything.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes, yes. It's making it tough on us. If you just want to forget about the partialling and say, "Do we find a zero-order correlation," absolutely we do. But that correlation, again, diminishes when you start partialling out other alternatives. We thought it was still a reasonably important finding.

We also looked, now you may still consider this to be in the vocabulary domain, any kind of vocabulary is a mental tool. These are mental tools that we use and they bootstrap metacognition in the sense that they serve to stabilize thought. The cognitive scientist, Andy Clark, has written quite eloquently about this.

So, what we did was to focus on some mental state words. We borrowed some of the task and materials from my colleague here at the University of Toronto, David Olson, whose work is definitely worth looking at. If you read nothing else of David's, read two things: his 1994 book, and I'll hook you with the title, The World on Paper, Cambridge University Press. I think that will be high on your reading list. Then a classic paper he wrote many years ago in the Harvard Educational Review in 1977 (Olson, D. R. (1977) From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 257-281). It is about how the emergence of the earliest style of writing led to cognitive change, led to the types, again, of explicit decontextualization. That is a type of thinking skill, again, that I study in my critical thinking work.

David Boulton: Which brings me back to a question that I've been holding, which is the implicate relationship between the processing involved in reading and critical thinking.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Well, I think we are right there, in the sense that I think an elaborated vocabulary - and I'll tell you what, let me pick up that thread but let me finish telling you this David Olson paradigm because we used it in our work.

So, there's a little story. It's something like: Steven left the candy bar in the room, and he left the room. His mother sees it and puts it in the cupboard. Steven comes back and his candy bar is gone. He goes to his sister's room and he sees crumbs on the floor. Steven thinks that his sister must have eaten his candy bar. Then what the respondent has to do is to decide what is the appropriate substitute word for that word 'thinks.' They're given alternatives, so instead of, "Steven thinks that his sister must have eaten the candy bar," the subject has to choose: Does Steven know his sister has eaten the candy bar? Has Steven proven his sister has eaten the candy bar? Has Steven inferred that his sister has eaten the candy bar? Has Steven discovered that his sister has eaten the candy bar, and a whole bunch of others like that.

David Boulton: Like 'assumed.'

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yeah. It's the ability to pick out the particular mental state term. This task, again, this is David's task not mine, is to be able to pick out a particular mental state term. So, it's full of words like: "Does Jim contradict, doubt, suggest, concede?" So, we ran this task in some of our print exposure studies and we got a pretty robust effect there, again, in the sense that you and I have already discussed, even in this biased analyses, where like we took out the person's intelligence and looked at print exposure.

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Dr. Keith Stanovich: Now let me segue back to that question you asked because I think sometimes in education vocabulary is looked at in much too mundane a way. Indeed, vocabulary is a person's tools of thought.

David Boulton: And the exercise environment for extending their verbal intelligence.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes, wonderful. And extending verbal intelligence. But also a thing I want to stress is the metacognitive functions because that's what's coming into play with these mental state terms.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: These are ways of interrogating our own cognition. First of all, language gave us a big,  like just any type of language gave us a leg up on that. This is what Andy Clark writes very well about in his 1997 book called Being There. Dennett writes about this, too, quite nicely. So, any type of language gives us the discrete categories, the kind of stabilizing vehicles, if we can stabilize thought with categories then that's going to encourage the kind of reflection on our own thought that's the quintessence of metacognitive abilities.

David Boulton: And 'I am,' the whole self-reflexive structure of ourselves.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Absolutely. Then you add in this David Olson emphasis on now you have the tool of language, but what do you have in your tool kit? What do you have in that carpenter's kit? Do you have just simple high-frequency clunky words like think and know, or do you have contradict, concede, assume, and all the mental state terms that he was studying in his work? Do you have a set of fine blades and screwdrivers?

David Boulton: How many bits is your color palette?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Right. That's a wonderful analogy. So, to the extent that our print exposure work showed bootstrapping in these types of domains, I mean, you better believe that I think this is a bootstrapping of, literally, the tools of thought. I titled one of our print exposure papers, Does Reading Make You Smarter?

David Boulton: Many people get locked that it's about the knowledge acquired through the reading, which obviously to some degree it is; but the capacity for processing that gets developed in order to learn to read...

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes.

David Boulton: Seems to get lost.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Seems to get lost, yes. I'm right with you.

David Boulton: This is a little off your track, but did you ever read The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: No. Tell me.

David Boulton: He's more philosopher than scientist, for sure. He wrote a book that has become quite a thing in a lot of universities. Are you familiar with the organization The Utne Reader?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Oh, yes.

David Boulton: Utne Reader did a Top 100 Visionaries on the Planet review a few years ago and listed David Abram as one of a hundred leading visionaries currently transforming the world.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Wow. I’ll have to take a look at this.

David Boulton: One of the things he did, following in the footsteps of Logan and McLuhan to some extent, on The Alphabet Effect, but from a different angle, was discuss the effect of alphabetic literacy on the intelligence of culture.

One of the cases Abram makes is that people in indigenous oral language cultures are functioning distinctly different than people that can't read in our world. People without literacy in our culture are still operating in an oral language vocabulary environment that has been radically affected by writing.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes. Absolutely.

David Boulton: So, you have to get outside of that to take a look at what  kinds of vocabulary are in use and what's the dimension of abstraction, generalization, and self reflection that's going on in a language environment that was never touched by writing.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Right. So that's what he takes up?

David Boulton: That's one of the things he takes up.

David Boulton: One of the things that we're trying to say with all of this is that, first of all, the effect of writing is incredibly important. We're talking about a technology interface that is significantly different than the oral language processing infrastructure it overlays. Whether we go the FoxPro gene route or go anthropologically, we've been talking for quite a while. So, the circuitry involved in processing, whether you want to go with Pinker's ‘language instinct’ or other models - is in there. Also, learning oral language processing has the benefit of being able to feel the movements of articulation and being able to hear in real-time yourself and others, and making the kind of distinctions that are core to tuning that infrastructure in.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes, but reading is unnatural.

David Boulton: Reading is unnatural. Not only is it unnatural, the original writing systems that exploded in Greece and Rome and that led to the birth and the infrastructure of western civilization were phonetic.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes..

David Boulton: They were one letter, one sound. We're only a couple hundred years since this writing system has really began widespread use.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: A blink in terms of it being in widespread use. Then one thing you'll find in David's essay, we're a blink from the essay of style, a decontextualized style of writing is even more recent. So yeah, you're right on.

David Boulton: And that at the core this technology is a technology that developed in England where for 300 years the kings and the parliament were French speaking.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes.

David Boulton: English was a peasant language without a writing system. And because a particular king needed to finance his wars in Europe and developed a way to communicate with people that had money in England that only spoke English by developing a writing system that was built by Latin and French trained scribes who didn't even speak the language...

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Right. The whole thing Venezky and Scragg have taught us about, yes.

David Boulton: Right. Although one of the things, and I had a great conversation with Venezky about this, is that I think we're prone to looking at this on the other side of it, as adult masters looking back on the code with all of our ways of describing and thinking about it with the metacognitive tools that have been made possible by having learned it.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Oh, yeah.

David Boulton: Which is an entirely different thing than: what's the challenge? What's the kinds of ambiguities that the child is facing as they're learning their way into it?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Absolutely. Then that's exacerbated when major articles in the reading field get titled "Reading is Natural."

David Boulton: One of the first jobs we have is to show how untenable that idea is. In particular, coming back to almost where we began in all of this.  Reading is this code instructed and informed system of projecting a virtual reality language experience by engaging and using this underlying native oral language processor. There are timing criticalities in how all of these different modules have to interact, there's an overhead associated with disambiguating the letter sound correspondences that puts a drag on assembling this stream before attention span breaks down.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: I think that's one of the phrases in one of the earlier interviews I fixated on. You're talking about overhead, and your way of phrasing that reminded me again of those types of compensatory models and bottleneck models that we talk about. It definitely resonates with that theory.

David Boulton: Reid Lyon says ninety-five percent of the children that are struggling; are struggling because we're not teaching them right. The NAEP scores in the United States indicate that eighty-four percent of African-American twelfth graders are reading below proficiency. They are, to various degrees, ashamed of their minds. They're not getting the intelligence exercise that we've been speaking about in the course of our conversation today. 

And to a significant extent, what we're saying is that a failure to be able to interface with an archaic, messed up, neglected technology is all but fating the lives of most of the children.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Well, there's really two issues, though, floating around here that are getting fused a bit, though.

David Boulton: Okay, good. That's why we're talking.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: There's your idea of, and I like that the phrase of 'a writing system is a technology,' and it's a cultural artifact that is, again, not natural in the sense that those famous articles in reading talk about things being natural.

David Boulton: And not like today's technology, where some team got together and figured it out. We would not let machine in the world run anything like this.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Right. Now, there's it being a technology in the insight, and there's that insight. But then that's the point you just made, I think the issue is then: How efficacious a technology this is is kind of another issue. I think there are two things because there's technologies that are not as messed up, but nonetheless, someone would still have to have the insight, that you're still dealing with a cultural artifact. All I'm saying is that those are all good points, but I think there are two things rattling around in there.

David Boulton: More and more work seems to be showing how critical the processing, the oral language rate of processing, is to whether or not reading flies.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes. Although, again, that's one of the issues that is a bit arcane in the sense that many of these timing theories are hard to pin down. So, if we're talking about the type of timing that's specifically underlying the phonological deficit, then there's probably a lot more agreement than if you're talking about some type of timing problem per se, where a child having difficulty with reading should have difficulty in all types of timing tests. You see what I mean?

David Boulton: Yes. No, I wouldn't go there, either. But it seems to me that the more ambiguous the letter sound correspondence, the more processing time it takes. I mean, as you know, when we first recognize a letter, it's not like it was in the days of Plato where he says, "Once we knew the letters of the alphabet, we could read." Reading was a matter of seeing the next letter, articulating it, blending it together fast, that was that. Today there's an ‘internal assembly’ process required that's different, and that the time that it takes to get from that print to a representation in sound that makes enough sense that it can then move on into subsequent levels of processing… it takes time.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Oh, yes. Certainly there's good work looking at how the variability in that time and the complexity involved makes a difference.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Something that you said earlier resonated when you were talking about discussing with Venezky that we tend to look at things with the adults' highly developed metacognitive skills and knowledge of the system. Of course teachers have to do the imaginative act of throwing that off, by the way, an aspect of decontextualization, a skill that they have to employ. But one thing that resonated there was that introspection has been a fairly inadequate guide to how reading works throughout the study of reading.

The point you were making, I think, fits that quite well in that the difficulty of some of these complexities is certainly not obvious to the well practiced laymen. Research has confidently found that introspection really wasn't a great guide to the reading process, all the way back to eye movements, where very few people have the introspection of saccadic movements and jumps, and that they're functionally blind during these sweeps, and all the things that Keith Rayner has shown us. We have no introspection about any of that.

A second example, is phonological awareness itself. So, a practice layperson will say, "I access meaning directly," but in fact, you can get them in Chuck Perfetti's lab and do some sophisticated manipulations and show that they do. Then the work of mine, that context effects are not very operative in the good reader at the word recognition level. This is the thing that was counterintuitive. See people think they use context a lot and they do for comprehension, for integration of meaning. But what they're not using it for is for lexical access. Again, that wasn't introspectively obvious, either.

David Boulton: Except in the case where the sound of a particular letter which shifts the sound of a particular word depends upon four words down the road.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes, and all kinds of things like that. So, I think your point about it really takes an introspective leap to get into the mind of the learner, I think that's the important point. It certainly resonates with a lot of problems the reading field has had by using the introspections of highly practiced people.

David Boulton: Yes. That was one of the pitfalls of the whole language argument, right?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Exactly.

David Boulton: How a great reader reads is not a model of how to teach those who don't know how to read.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: It's not a model of how to teach someone reading. Now we're going back to the beginning of the interview because that was exactly Frank Smith's conjecture in understanding reading in that 1971 book; that a view into the processing mechanisms of the fluent reader was a perfect view into the world of the learner and how you should deal with the learner. And that turned out to be exactly wrong.