the beginning of decoding

The beginning of decoding

PHILIP B. G O U G H University of Texas at Austin, USA

ABSTRACT: It is widely agreed that children recognize their first words in a different way than they later decode. One hypothesis is that sight words are recognized as wholes, another that they are recognized by parts~ Two experiments were devised to compare these hypotheses. In one, children were taught a sight word accompanied by a salient extraneous cue and then tested for recognition of the word and the cue. In the other, children were taught sight words, then tested for recognition of each half of the word. The children were found to recognize the cue but not the word; they recognized one half of the word but not the other, The results support the idea that first words are recognized by selective association.

KEY WORDS: Decoding, Local and global hypothesis, Selective association, Sight vocabulary

How does decoding begin ? How does a child learn to read her first words?

We know that first words may be learned in many different places, and under many different circumstances. But whether they are learned through environmental print or direct instruction, students of reading seem to agree that first words are learned differently than later words. This is, it could be argued, the basic assumption of stage models of reading acquisition like those of Chall (1983), Ehri (1992), Frith (1985), and Marsh (Marsh, Friedman, Welch & Desberg 1980).

Everyone seems to agree that first words are learned as sight words. But what exactly is a sight word? It seems clear that what is intended is that it is a word that is not ' sounded out'; it is not read 'phonologically'. Its recogrftion is 'direct', unmediated by letter-sound correspondences. The word is treated as a logogram, as if there were no relationships between the components of the printed word and the segments of its spoken counterpart° First words are often recognized well before the child receives any instruction in phonics, and well before the child could have induced any spelling sound correspondences on her own, so they must be recognized solely on the basis of their visual form. They must be recognized not on how they sound but on how they look, i.e., by sight.

But two conflicting ideas have been proposed about how this might be done. One is that children recognize the word holistically. This idea was proposed more than two centuries ago (Gedike 1779, cited in Mathews 1966), and given great impetus by Gestalt psychology (Diack 1960). For

Reading and Writing." An Interdisciplinary Journal 5:181-- 192, 1993. © 1993 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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example, Schonell argued that 'words are first perceived as wholes, that is to say, it is the total pattern or schema or gestalt of the word that young pupils . . . first observe' (Schonell & Goodacre 1971). Let us call this the global hypothesis.

A very different idea has also been proposed. This is the idea that, instead of the whole, it is some part of the word which the child uses to recognize it. Gates & Boeker argued that 'the beginner in reading proceeds in much the same manner as does the adult in learning Chinese characters, or other complex and meaningless visual material, namely by actively studying the details until some feature, usually minute, is found by means of which the whole may again be identified' (1923: 7). Let us call this the local hypothesis.

The local and global hypotheses clearly differ in how they claim the sight word is recognized. They agree that early word recognition is different from later word recognition; it is direct rather than mediated, visual rather than phonological. But one says the child uses the whole word, the other only a part of it.

Which hypothesis is correct? The answer is not trivial, for it has implica- tions for our understanding of both early reading and early spelling. More- over, we will argue that it will help us account for some aspects of reading disability.

The present studies were conducted to decide between the local and global hypotheses. The studies employed a procedure developed in the study of cue selection in adult paired-associated learning (e.g., Underwood 1963). In this procedure, the subject learns a response to a compound stimulus (e.g., a nonsense syllable printed on a colored background). Then the compound is separated, and the learner is tested for recognition of its parts.

If the global hypothesis is correct, if it is the whole that the child recognizes, then demolishing that whole should efiminate, or at least reduce, recognition of the word. If the local hypothesis is correct, if it is only a part of the word that the child recognizes, then the child should fully recognize that part, but not the word's other parts.

EXPERIMENT 1: THE THUMBPRINT STUDY

Our first attempt to pit the hypotheses involved a thumbprint. We wondered what would happen if the child were taught to sight read some words, where one of those words was accompanied by a salient but irrelevant cue. It seemed quite probable that the child would notice that cue, and even associate the word with it. But if the association is selective, then the child shotfld ignore the other visual cues offered by the word, namely its letters. Experiment 1 was conducted to test these hypotheses.

Method. Using flashcards, each of 49 4- and 5-year-old children, drawn from a Lutheran day school in Austin, was taught four sight words. Half of the

THE BEGINNING OF DECODING 183

children learned a Similar List (BAG, BAT, RAG, RAT), half learned a Dissimilar List (BOX, LEG, SUN, RAT).

Each child was taught individually, using standard paired associate learning procedures with anticipation and correction. That is, the child was shown each word and asked, 'Do you know what this word is?' (If the child could recognize any of the four words, he was excused, 5 children were eliminated in this way.) Then the child was told what the word was ('This is _'), asked to repeat it, and reinforced ('Yes, that's _ _ ' ) . On subsequent trials, the child was asked to identify the word, and either reinforced ('Yes, that's ___ ' ) or corrected ('No, that's _ _ ' ) . This procedure was continued until the child reached a criterion of twice through the list without error. (If the child evinced disinterest, they were also excused; 7 Ss were eliminated this way.)

For each child, one (and only one) of the four flashcards bore a thumbprint. Across children, the thumbprint was rotated across words, so that it appeared with each of the four words equally often. So each child learned one thumbprinted word and three 'clean' words, in either a Similar or a Dissimilar List.

After reaching criterion, the child was tested, without warning or comment (i.e., as if the learning task was still continuing), on three new items. First, they were tested on the word without the thumbprint. This was followed in succession by two of the clean words as 'filler' items. Then the child was shown a card bearing the thumbprint without the word. Following two more filler words, they were shown one of the clean words again, but this time paired with the thumbprint.

Results. The data from 5 children who failed to identify one or more filler words were discarded. Thus the final results are based on 32 children, 16 who learned the Similar List, and 16 who learned the Dissimilar List.

The Dissimilar List was learned significantly faster than the Similar List [t(30) ~ 2.15; p < 0.05]. It took the children, on average, 6.06 trials (SD = 4.27) to reach criterion on the Dissimilar List, while the Similar List required 10.44 (SD = 6.93). (This difference is surely underestimated, for of the 7 children who quit before reaching criterion, 6 were learning the Similar List.)

The learning curves for the four kinds of items, presented in Figure 1, indicate that this difference was not due to the thumbprint items. In each list, the item bearing the thumbprint was learned almost at once, far faster than the other three words. That the effect of the thumbprint was immediate was supported by a 2 x 4 (List x Trial) analysis of variance with repeated measures on the latter factor. This revealed no effect of the first four trials [F(3,30) ~ 1.73; p > 0.10], and the items were at ceiling after that. Moreover, the thumbprint item was learned equally fast in the two lists: there was no main effect of List IF(l,30) = 0.11; p > 0.10], nor did it interact with Trials [F(3,30) = 0.44; p > 0.10]. Indeed, the majority of the children learned the thumbprint item on first sight: 13 of 16 Ss learning the Similar

184 P H I L I P B. G O U G H

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1

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.6

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.2

0 0

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2 4 6 8 t0

Trial

OS-T O S-N

&, D-T A. D-N

Figure 1. Probability correct as a funct ion of trails and i tem type (S--T = thumbpr in ted i tem in Similar List, S-N = clean i tem in Similar List, D - T = thumbpr in ted i tem in Dissimilar List, D - N = clean i tem in Dissimilar List).

List and 14 Ss learning the Dissimilar List recognized the thumbprint word on the first anticipation trial.

The children's responses to the subsequent test items also reveal the impact of the thumbprint. Shown the previously thumbprinted word without the thm~bprint, only a minority (13 of 32) of the children (0.40) could identify it. This was true whether they were learning the Similar List (8 of 16) or the Dissimilar List (5 of 16); the difference was not significant [t(30) -- 0.89;p > 0.10].

In contrast, the majority of the children (26 of 32) could identify the thumbprint without the word. Again, the difference between lists (14 of 16 with the Similar, 12 of 16 with the Dissimilar) was not significant It(30) -- 0.89;p > 0.10].

That the thumbprint captured the children's attention is still further revealed by their responses to the third test item, when another word, previously recognizable by itself, was now paired with the thumbprint. With either list, 11 of 16 Ss (0.69) ignored the word and responded to the thumbprint.

Discussion. Taken together, the results of Experiment 1 clearly indicate that if a salient extraneous cue accompanies a word, the child wilt associate the spoken word with that cue, and ignore the word itself. Moreover, this happens whether the words are easy or difficult to discriminate.

Theorists like Y. Goodman (1986) suggest that children learn many words through interaction with what they call environmental print, that is, words encountered in the ordinarily, noninstructional environment. What the present


results indicate is that children are not likely to learn much about these words if they are accompanied by any salient extraneous cue, like the golden arches of MacDonald's. And, of course, that is exactly what has been revealed by the studies of Dewitz & Stammer (1980) and Masonheimer, Drum & Ehri (1984) who found that children could readily identify words on logos but could not recognize them if typed on clean cards.

The present results show that even when they are receiving direct instruction, even when they are learning intentionally rather than incidentally, beginning readers selectively associate the word with a salient extraneous cue. Only a minority of children associate the word with its printed form.

These results are clearly consistent with the local hypothesis. But it is not at all clear that they refute the global hypothesis. It is true that the division of the stimulus did not render it unrecognizable, as the idea of holistic recognition would seen to entail. But the Gestalt theorist could certainly argue that the thumbprint and the word would not be combined into a single Gestalt; they do not exhibit 'belongingness'. The word and thumbprint would, instead, be seen by the child as two Gestalts. The fact that the child attended to one and ignored the other would tell us nothing about whether the word itself (i.e., an ordinary word unaccompanied by any salient extraneous cue) is recognized as a whole.

We want, then, to compare the local (selective association) and global (Gestalt) hypotheses, applying the cue selection technique to ordinary words. The problem that confronts us lies in identifying which cue the child will select. If we knew which cue that might be, we could employ the same cue selection procedure used in the previous study: we could separate that cue from the rest of the word, and compare the child's recognition of that cue with the recognition of the remainder. But we don't know where the selected cue will be found.

It occurred to us that, while we don't know if the child will select a cue in the first half or the last half of the word, the selective association hypothesis holds that if they select a cue in one half of the word they should not select one in the other. So we might teach a child a few words, and then show the child the first half and the second half of each word. If the child is learning the word as a whole, as the global theorists have it, then if you destroy the Gestalt, the child should not recognize the word at all; the child should recognize neither half of the word. But if the word is learned through selective association, then the child should recognize one half of the word, but not the other.

EXPERIMENT 2: THE SPLIT WORD STUDY

Method. Using flashcards and the same training procedures as Experiment 1, 32 different 4- and 5-year-old children from another Austin preschool were

186 PHILIP B. GOUGH

individually taught to read 4, 4-letter words until they could read all four words twice in a row. The words (LAMB, DUCK, FISH, and PONY) were selected to share no letters, and to be of comparable familiarity. Upon reaching criterion, they were warmly congratulated. Then they were told, 'Now I'd like to see if you can read a word when I hide part of it', and shown, in random order, the first half and the last half of each word.

R e s u l t s . Each child responded to the first half and the last half of each word. Thus the child could recognize both halves of the word, the first half but not the second, the second but not the first, or neither half of the word. Each word was classified in this way. Since each of the 32 children responded to 4 words, 4 X 32 = 128 instances are tallied in Table 1.

Table 1. Cross-tabulation of 32 children's recognition of the first and last halves of 4, 4-letter words

First half Yes No Total

Second half

No Yes Total

54 36 90 10 28 38 64 64 128

For only 10 items were the children unable to recognize either half of the word; seldom (p = 0.08) did the children respond as if the word had been a Gestalt. The average child recognized the first half of 2.81 of the four words (p = 0.70), while they recognized the second half of 2.00 (0.50). This difference was statistically significant [t(31) = 2.81; p < 0.01].

More important to our purpose is the relation between the recognition of the first half and recognition of the second. According to Table 1, if children could recognize the first half of a word, the probability that they could recognize the second was 0.40 (36 of 90); but if they could not recognize the first, the probability of recognizing the second was almost doubled (0.74, o r

28 of 38). If they could recognize the second half, the probability that they could also recognize the first was 0.56 (36 of 64); if they could not recognize the second half, the probability of recognizing the first was half again as large (0.84, o r 54 of 64). In short, the relationship between recognition of the two halves was negative: Table 1 yields a phi coefficient of -0.31.

We cannot test the significance of the negative relationship with the phi coefficient. We cannot use the group data, for the 128 observations are not independent; each of 32 Ss provided 4 observations. We might calculate phi for each subject, using those 4 observations. But then phi is too frequently undefined (as it is whenever any row or column totals 0). So instead we

T H E B E G I N N I N G OF D E C O D I N G 187

calculated for each child a simple index of selectivity. We added together the number of words for which the child could recognize one half but not the other, and subtracted the number of words for which the child could recognize both halves or neither. Clearly, this score could range from +4 (complete selectivity) to --4 (whole recognition). The mean selectivity index for the 32 children was 1.25 (SD = 1.74). This difference was significantly positive It(31) = 4.06;p < 0.01].

There was not complete selectivity (had there been, the group phi would have equalled --1.0). Only 4 of the 32 children showed perfect selectivity (i.e., a selectivity index of 4). But another 16 showed selectivity on 3 of 4 words, 8 showed selectivity on 2, and 4 were selective on 1. Thus every child showed at least some selectivity, and no child treated every word as a whole.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The present results favor the local, or selective association, hypothesis over the global, or Gestalt, hypothesis. This is not to say that the global hypothesis is always wrong. In the present study, there were ten instances (out of 128 items) where children could not identify the word with any partial cue (i.e., either half of the word). Moreover, it is entirely possible that, even given selective association, the child could, under some circumstances, choose the entire word as the cue. This might well happen, for example, if the word bore a physiognomic resemblance to its denotation. But the general principle would appear to be that the child notices only parts of new words.

We have long felt (Gough & Hillinger 1980) that this principle might explain a number of observations of beginning reading, of the sort reported by Torrey (1979). For one thing, it is consistent with what children say about how they recognize words: Gates & Boeker (1923) reported that children said they recognized pig by means of the dot over the i, box by means of the funny cross on the right, window because the beginning was like the end, and monkey because it has a tail. It could also help explain why beginning readers learn dissimilar fists faster than similar lists (Otto & Pizillo 1970) but make more 'generalization' errors to other words (e.g, reading dinosaur as dog).

It could be argued that sight word association is only initially selective, selective only during the child's first contact with a word. It is certainly true that the child might learn more about a word with practice (Spring, Gilbert & Sassenrath 1979), and register more of its letters in repeated encounters. This suggestion is not supported by the results of the first experiment, where repeated (and successful) encounters with the thumbprint word did not increase knowledge of its letters for the majority of the children. But it is certainly an empirical question, and one worth investigating, for we know little about the effects of practice on early- decoding.

The present results support the conclusion that selective association is the

188 PHILIP B. GOUGH

mechanism of early decoding. The child could learn many words in this way. But selective association brings with it two problems. One I call the Novelty Problem, the other the Memory Problem.

The Novelty Problem is the fact that selective association provides no means of decoding novel words. We adults so rarely encounter a novel word that we tend to forget that the child meets them constantly. (Every word we read was novel once.) But selective association will not help with the recognition of a new word; knowing that ELEPHANT is the long word, or CAMEL is the one with humps, cannot help the child decode HORSE.

Some scholars (Goodman 1976; Smith 1985) hold that context is the answer, that the child can use the preceding text, together with background knowledge, to identify an unknown word. Context can help, and surely does, sometimes. Yet context is a false friend. Context helps the child with pre- dictable words, but less -- if at all -- with unpredictable words. But word predictability is four times larger with function words than content words, and it decreases with word frequency and length (Gough, Alford & Holley- Wilcox 1981). The child needs little help reading common function words like the or other common, short words; where they need help is with unfamiliar words. So context helps the child where she needs it least, and lets her down where she needs it most.

Another proposal (Goswami & Bryant 1990) is that children decode novel words by analogy to words they already know; they think of a word which shares a rime (Treiman 1985; Treiman & Zukowski 1991) with the novel word, and then modify its pronunciation. This, too, could happen, and Goswami (1988) has shown that it sometimes does. But it cannot be of much help, because the majority of novel words encountered by the child will have no analogue in their sight vocabulary. (Think only of LAMB, DUCK, FISH, and PONY, to say nothing of HORSE, ZEBRA, LION, C A M E L . . . ; none of these words is apt to have a rhyme in the young child's sight vocabulary.)

The child decoding by selective association simply lacks any effective mechanism for dealing with the Novelty Problem. The same could be said of the Memory Problem. This problem is the fact that while it's easy to find a cue to distinguish one word from a few others, with each additional word it becomes harder.

We tend to think of word recognition -- of decoding -- as a perceptual process. But it can equally well be thought of as a process of memory search, of finding the word in memory which matches the printed word. When the child can only file things arbitrarily -- when each word must be remembered as a unique and separate item -- only rote memory can be used. The things to be remembered -- the shapes of the printed words -- are meaningless and highly similar. They must be extraordinarily difficult to memorize. We should remember that given a similar challenge, that of memorizing kanji characters, the Japanese child is asked to learn less than 200 per year in the first six grades.


An alphabetic writing system evidently provides a better filing system than a logographic one. Indeed, we use this system to file every'thing from phone numbers to books on the shelf. But the reason why the alphabetic filing system works is because the filed item is located at (i.e., labelled by) its address. In a telephone book, my phone number is located just beside my name; in a dictionary, the meaning of cat is located right beside the letter sequence CAT.

In the child's head, in the child's mental lexicon, the meaning of cat is not located at CAT; its address is the phoneme sequence/k~et/. To give it the address CAT, that sequence must be placed in memory; the child must remember (that is, commit to memory) that spelling. But this is difficult, because for this child, that spelling is .wholly arbitrary; it can be learned only by rote, by memorization.

For a child learning to read a language with an alphabetic orthography, both of these problems would be solved if the child were to master what we (Gough, Juel & Griffith 1992) have called the orthographic cipher, the system of letter-sound correspondences, of that language. The Novelty Problem would be solved, for the cipher would enable her to decipher a novel word into phonological form, given which may be recognized. The Memory Problem would be solved (or at least diminished), for the cipher would provide the child with a systematic way of storing spellings in memory. This is not to say that the need for memory would be eliminated; the child must still remember that HEAD is pronounced/bEd/ , not /hid/ , and that it is spelled HEAD, not HED. But everything we know about human memory, indicates that it is far easier to learn and remember a structured set of items than an arbitrary collection.

For all its irregularity, English is an alphabetic system: there are systematic correspondences between the letters of written words and the phonemes of spoken words. The correspondences are numerous and complex. Almost none of them are one-to-one (that is, a single letter mapping onto a single phoneme). Instead, they are context-dependent; the pronunciation of nearly every letter depends on the surrounding letters.

How does the child acquire the cipher? For the majority of children, the answer is reading instruction. This is, of course, the goal of phonics instruction: its aim is to teach the child the letter-sound correspondences. The aim of phonics is admirable; we (Gough & Walsh 1991) have argued that you cannot become a skilled reader without the cipher. But phonics succeeds only partially: there are too many correspondences to teach, and those that are taught are not internalized by many of its students (Gough & Juel 1990). Moreover, many children taught without phonics still manage to internalize the cipher (Tunmer & Nesdale 1985). This leads us to believe that the cipher is not the result of direct instruction (put better, the cipher is not the direct result of direct instruction), but is instead acquired througja the child's own codebreaking, or crryptanalysis. What is necessary for this is phonemic aware-

190 PHILIP B. GOUGH

ness. However they might be taught, children without phonemic awareness simply fail to master the cipher (Juel 1988; Juel, Griffith & Gough 1986; Tunmer & Nesdale 1985).

Whether it results from phonics instruction or not, the child who masters the cipher reads and spells in a very different way from the child who does not (Gough, Juel & Roper-Schneider 1983; Juel, Griffith & Gough 1985). The child with the cipher reads faster and more accurately than the child without. The cipher reader exhibits a large effect of word regularity, but a small effect of frequency. The cipher reader makes fewer errors, of which a greater percentage are neologisms and fewer are word substitutions, and those substitutions are less often drawn from previously read material. The cipher readers also spells differently, more accurately and more phonologically.

All this adds up to show that the child who has internalized the cipher reads and spells in a different way than the child who hasn't. But here we would emphasize the hasn't, the child who cannot read pseudowords, for such a child reads and spells very much like a child who is still reading by selective association.

Children lacking the cipher show a large frequency effect, as they must if they" are reading by selective association; by defimtion, they cannot decipher unfamiliar words. They exhibit no regularity effect; the regularity of a word is irrelevant to selective association. The child's errors bear little phonological resemblance to the target, for cue selection has nothing to do with phonol- ogy; in fact, those errors will almost always be word substitutions, never neologisms, and they will only resemble the target phonologically by accident.

Selective association may be demonstrated most dramatically in spelling. If the child thinks that CAMEL is the one with htmaps, the child will record the humps, but any additional letters will be chosen at random. (In fact, we have seen these children include nonalphabetic symbols, like ampersands and digits; since they have not grasped the alphabetic principle, any character will do.) Spelling errors will thus abound, and they will seldom sound like the target (they may even be other words).

What this suggests is that the reading disabled child is still mired in the first stage of decoding, that of recognizing words by selective association. This proposal is most consistent with a developmental lag hypothesis of reading disability. But it should be clear that the disabled reader is not thereby only behind, only quantitatively different from the normal reader. If the disabled reader is reading by selective association, he is reading in a qualitatively different way than one who reads with the aid of the cipher, for the beginning of decoding is qualitatively different from the end.

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Masonheimer, P. E., Drum P. A. & Ehri, L. C. (1984). Does environmental print identification lead children into word reading? Journal of Reading Behavior I6: 257--272.

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Treiman, R. & Zukowski, A. (1991). Children's awareness of rhymes, syllables and phonemes. In: S. Brady & D. Shankweiler (eds.), Phonological processes in literacy (pp. 67--83). Hillsdale, N J: Erlbaum Associates.

Tunmer, W. E. & Nesdale, A. R. (1985). Phonemic segmentation skill and beginning reading. Journal of Educational Psychology 77:417--427.

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Address for correspondence: Dr Philip B. Gough, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA Phone: (512) 471 3785; Fax: (512) 471 5935; e-mail: [email protected]

the beginning of decoding

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