Adult Literacy            

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: I don't know if you want to get into it or not, because it's probably a little different than what your primary focus is on, but a very important thing is children grow up to be adolescents and young adults, and they need to -- whatever they want to aspire to be, a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a writer, they often have to take a series of tests. One of the things we know is that because children who struggle to read don't develop that left word forming area that's responsible for being able to read more fluently, they read very slowly and require extra time.

That becomes a really important thing, because so many children who've worked so hard all their lives, they come to the point where they need to take an SAT or an ALSED Law School Admissions Test or a GRE, and they require extra time if they're going to be able to show what they know. There's been a very strong -- it's not a movement, I don't know the right word -- but these children are more and more being denied the extra time that they require.

David Boulton: There's this general failure in the way that we think about assessment, to actually meet the kids in some way that reflects what their situation is.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right, not to feel that they're somehow getting away with something, or weak. If somebody needs glasses, you wouldn't question it, or if a diabetic needs insulin, in the same we know that children, or young adults and adults who have reading problems require extra time. For me, as a physician and as a scientist, one of the most exciting things has been that we've been able to now demonstrate that in children who are dyslexic, they don't develop that word forming area, but they do develop compensatory regions, on the right side of the brain and also in the front, that allow them to read, but not automatically so that they can become highly accurate readers, but by the investment of an extraordinary amount of time and energy. They can get there, but their route is much slower and more inefficient.

David Boulton: Right. There's some kind of a circuit detour that's had to happen for them.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Exactly.

David Boulton: Which is slower in processing and results in them needing more time to be as effective in the task.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Right. What I say now is that dyslexia simply robs a person of time, accommodations like extra time return part of it, and that a person who is dyslexic has as much a physiologic need for extra time as a diabetic needs for insulin.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Now that we can show that with our brain imaging, that's made an extraordinary difference. Because I've seen too many young people who were applying to graduate school or professional school who struggled their lives to reach the point where they can read accurately, but not automatically, are turned down for extra time. It's like somebody climbing to the top of a mountain and you suddenly step on their fingers, and don't let them take that last step, and knock them down. So, it may not sound like an important thing to you, but for all those people who have had difficulty reading it is.

David Boulton: All of these dimensions are critical. We're looking at the family context, the social context, very particularly at the emotional affective context as well as the cognitive processing challenge.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's at the very -- that's at the heart.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's the heart and soul of it. Because you can teach a person to read, and you can do all the things, but if they've had that hurt and that pain and that blow to their self-esteem, that's the most difficult. We have no medicine for that.

David Boulton: Yes. And it's not just a bad feeling they're having; it's fundamentally processing-level debilitating, draining of the efficiency that's necessary to process the thing that could make them feel better. It works in a downward spiral.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right.

Sally Shaywitz, Pediatric Neuroscience, Yale University, Author of Overcoming Dyslexia. Source: COTC Interview - http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/shaywitz.htm#SlowReaders

The Processes of Skilled Reading

Dr. Keith Rayner: Most of my own research is with skilled readers. So I'm interested in: What is it that people do when they're skilled readers? What are the processes that they engage in?

I largely approach it by recording their eye movements while they read, and then try to infer what the mental processes are. We also do things where we make changes in the text, contingent on the eye movements. So, the classic experiment is one where we control how much you can see on each eye fixation via what's called the "moving window technique." Or we have also used another technique called the "boundary technique," where you're reading along, and there's a word off to the right of where your eye is, but then when your eye goes into motion that word changes to another word.

David Boulton: So, you say you're introducing a confusing or ambiguous situation and seeing what to do with it?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Well, it isn't ambiguous. What we do is vary the relationship between the first word and the second word, so they can be semantically, phonologically or orthographically related. Then we try to infer what kind of information you would be getting from that word before you got to it, as a function of the relationship between the first and second word, and how long you then look at the word that's there when your eyes get there.

We've done a little of this with children, but it's mostly done with adults to try and see how much information you're getting different distances from where your eye is currently looking at the moment.

Then the other thing I do a lot of is have people read sentences or text that do indeed have ambiguities in them, so there would be phonological ambiguity or lexical ambiguities or syntactic ambiguities. So they might read a sentence like, "While Mary was mending, the socks fell off her lap." And there may or may not be a comma after mending, but if there's not a comma after was mending, then usually people misplace the sentence because they take the sock to be the object that the verb was mending, and then they're all messed up. So we try and infer what kind of structures are they building as they read to help them parse the sentence.

Or in the case of lexical ambiguity, they might read a sentence where the word bank is there, and then it turns out that it's referring to a river bank, rather than a money bank.  And so again, we try and see -- infer what kind of processes they are using to understand by looking at what their eyes do.

David Boulton: Do you also put multiple tasks in to see whether they stack up to consume more time between fixations?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Well, in fact, there are fixation time differences as a function of these manipulations that we make. The task, for us, is typically always just read the text. Then there are variations in how long people look at things, as a function of these kinds of manipulations that we make.

Keith Rayner, Distinguished Professor, Psychology Department, University of Massachusetts; Director of the University's 
Eyetracking Laboratory. Source: COTC Interview - http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/rayner.htm#SkilledReading

Word Recognition Timing Thresholds in Skilled Readers 

Dr. Keith Rayner: What I know for adults, which is where all of our work is done, is that it takes about fifty milliseconds to get the information into the system. We've done experiments where people are reading, and if we mask the text or we take it away, but they get to see it for fifty milliseconds, that's enough time.

David Boulton: So, by controlling how long something appears, you can find out what the recognition threshold is?

Dr. Keith Rayner: We can get the threshold for: How long does this stuff have to be there to get it into the system?  If we leave it up for less than fifty milliseconds then reading falls apart; it's really disrupted. But if we give them fifty or sixty milliseconds to see the text, then the orthographic information that's there in front of their eyes gets into the system. It doesn't matter if the text goes away after that. In fact, there are interesting things like if they're looking at a low frequency word -- so when you read normally, right, and we record your eye movements, you'll always look longer at a low frequency word than a high frequency word. Even when we take the text away or mask it so it's not there anymore, the eyes will stay in place longer for the low frequency word than the high frequency word, which is pretty interesting. So, that's basically saying the mental operations that are involved in figuring out what that word is are driving the eye movements through the text.

David Boulton: So, there's a loop going on that the eyes are a part of, being directed by, freed up, told to move on, at each iteration of some kind of coherent capture of object.

Dr. Keith Rayner: Yes. We've done other experiments where we present -- do you know what the word "prime" means?

David Boulton: In the sense that it's cuing up the -- priming you for what's coming next; it's creating a decreased field of possibility around what's coming?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Yes. So, imagine this scenario: You're reading a sentence, and think of a target word in the sentence somewhere, say it's the fifth word in the sentence. Before your eyes get to it, there's just a string of random letters there. So we're using this technique where we're going to change things contingent on when your eye moves to that word. We make this change always during a saccade, during the eye movements, so that vision is expressed, you never see this change take place.

David Boulton: A saccade is a...

Dr. Keith Rayner: Saccade is a fancy name for eye movement.

David Boulton: Okay. So, when the eye is in motion is when you create this change so that you don't actually get an attention blip when you're on a more static eye fixation.

Dr. Keith Rayner: Right. The change takes place during saccade, you don't see it. So in our standard boundary paradigm, that's what would happen, we'd present a string of letters; or we'd present a word and you'd move into the word, and as soon as your eye starts approaching -- you know, coming into a word, it changes to another word.

Now, then in a slightly different variation of that, we present a string of random letters where the fifth word should be. Your eye moves into that location. Now we present a prime word, which only stays on the screen for the first thirty or forty milliseconds of the eye fixation, and then it changes to the word that's going to be there the rest of the time. Now, this change will get seen, because it's happening during a fixation. There are two changes in this particular paradigm. What we do in those experiments is we vary the orthographic phonological or semantic relationship between the prime word and the target word.

David Boulton: So, you're actually wanting to see how they recover from their own prediction?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Well, it's not necessarily their prediction. It's how much use they're able to get in that early time frame of something that's orthographically similar or phonologically similar or semantically similar to the target word.

David Boulton: Okay.

Keith Rayner, Distinguished Professor, Psychology Department, University of Massachusetts; Director of the University's Eyetracking Laboratory. Source: COTC Interview - http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/rayner.htm#TimingThresholdsinSkilledReaders

The Milliseconds Between Orthography and Phonology   

Dr. Keith Rayner: What we find is that the orthography kicks in very quickly, so that over the whole priming interval that we look at the orthography, if the prime word is orthographically similar to the target word, you get some facilitation. But what's really interesting to me is the phonology kicks in really quickly, too. I mean, it's lagging behind the orthography only by about five or ten milliseconds, so that the orthographic information is getting in very quickly, but you're quickly converting that to a phonological representation.

We've also done experiments, going back, now, to the first -- to the paradigm I mentioned, where there's just one change. So think of this: You're reading and the word beach is your target word b-e-a-c-h. Now, before you get to that word, it could say, b-e-e-c-h, which is a homophone of b-e-a-c-h; or is could say b-e-n-c-h, which is orthographically very similar. Or it could just be another word like house, which is just totally unrelated to the prior word.

David Boulton: Right. Different levels of disruption to the expectation field that's unfolding.

Dr. Keith Rayner: Yes. So, what we find is that you get facilitation from having the homophone, above and beyond having the orthographic control word, so that when people's eyes land there, one of those things was there first, either the homophone beech or the orthographic control word bench or the unrelated word, or the identical word is there, so b-e-a-c-h could be there.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Keith Rayner: Then we look at: How long does it take to process this target word b-e-a-c-h as a function of what was there before? If the homophone was there before, you're about as fast as if the identical word was there and you're faster than if b-e-n-c-h was there. So before you get to a word, before the eyes actually fixate on it there's a preview benefit; you get some facilitation of the upcoming word, and phonology, again, is kicking in very quickly.

David Boulton: So, is that suggesting, you think, that somehow the phonological processing is being primed?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Yes, the phonological information is being primed. You're getting a head start on the phonological information before your eyes actually get to the word.

Keith Rayner, Distinguished Professor, Psychology Department, University of Massachusetts; Director of the University's Eyetracking Laboratory. Source: COTC Interview - http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/rayner.htm#MillisecondsBetweenOrthographyPhonology