Table of Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Copyright
4. Dedication
5. List of Tables and Figures
6. About the Author
7. Acknowledgment
8. Introduction: The Chicken Milanese Problem
   1. How Do You Make Chicken Milanese?
   2. Let's Do It Anyway
   3. The Plan of the Book
   4. References
9. 1 On Your Marks
   1. How Writing Might Work
   2. Sound and Meaning
   3. References
10. 2 Sound It Out
    1. Challenge 1: The Letters
    2. Challenge 2: The Sounds
    3. Challenge 3: The Mapping
    4. Summing Up
    5. References
11. 3 Reading at a Glance
    1. Spelling Representations in the Mind
    2. What Does Spelling Knowledge Look Like?
    3. Why Orthographic Representations Matter
    4. How Orthographic Representations Develop
    5. References
12. 4 Words, Words, Words
    1. The Baffling Complexity of Word Knowledge
    2. How Words Are Organized in the Mind
    3. Coping with Missing Meanings
    4. But What Does a Word Really Mean?
    5. Why Breadth and Depth Matter
    6. The Process of Learning New Words
    7. References
13. 5 Reading Comprehension
    1. Task Analysis of Reading Comprehension
    2. Extracting Ideas from Sentences
    3. Connecting Ideas
    4. The Situation Model
    5. Becoming a Better Reader
    6. References
14. 6 Becoming a Reader
    1. Attitudes, Motivation, and Reading
    2. Attitudes Toward Reading
    3. Motivation
    4. Self‐Concept
    5. Getting Kids to Read
    6. References
15. 7 Reading After the Digital Revolution
    1. Digital Tools for Reading
    2. Indirect Effects
    3. The Age of Distraction
    4. References
16. Conclusion
    1. Practitioners
    2. Policymakers
    3. On the Beauty of Theory
    4. References
17. Works Cited
18. Index
19. Notes
20. End User License Agreement

List of Tables

1. Chapter 01
   1. Table 1.1. Watching a cash register. Observations of a cash register might lead to basic principles of arithmetic.
2. Chapter 06
   1. Table 6.1. Examples personal to the author of how motivation relates to the value and expectation associated with different behaviors.
3. Chapter 07
   1. Table 7.1. Children's report of time spent per day on activity with media.
4. Conclusion
   1. Table C.1. Conclusions drawn.

List of Illustrations

1. Introduction
   1. Figure I.1. One letter, different fonts. These letters must all be interpreted as equivalent, even though they look different.
   2. Figure I.2. Ambiguous letters. Although I'm sure you read this sentence easily, if you look closely you'll notice the “e”s in the word “need” are the same shape as the “c” in “clean.” And the same shape is interpreted as a “v” and as a “u” in the word “volunteer.”
   3. Figure I.3. Reversible figures. At left, the black area can be seen as an object (vase) and the white area as background, or the white area seen as the object (dog profiles) and the black as background. At right, the mirror is seen as background when we focus on the woman and her reflection, but it may also been seen as the foreground object—a skull.
   4. Figure I.4. Medicine packaging. Literate people likely do not notice how frequently they rely on the ability to read. Here I've blurred the print on medicine packaging to help you imagine being unable to read, and trying to select a medicine for your child's sore throat, perhaps by attempting to match packaging with your memory of television commercials.
2. Chapter 01
   1. Figure 1.1. A pictograph of a ram.
   2. Figure 1.2. The ambiguity of pictographs. The Korean highway sign offers fairly unambiguous pictographs: food, gas, auto repair. Some jokester has added text to the pictographs on the bathroom hand drier showing that they are ambiguous, even if the alternative interpretation is improbable.
   3. Figure 1.3. Writing is a code for what you say. The top row shows written communication that directly codes meaning. The bottom row shows written communication that codes thoughts into words, and then words into sound.
   4. Figure 1.4. The relationship of word sound and meaning.
   5. Figure 1.5. Letters, translation rules, sound, and meaning.
   6. Figure 1.6. The phonemes used in American English. IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet.
3. Chapter 02
   1. Figure 2.1. Natural scene with T's and L's. T shapes and L shapes are commonly observed in the outlines of objects.
   2. Figure 2.2. Alphabetic shapes. This graph shows that alphabets use shapes commonly seen in the natural environment. The vertical axis shows the frequency that a particular shape is observed in alphabets. The horizontal axis shows the frequency that the shape is observed in a large set of photographs of natural scenes.
   3. Figure 2.3. Letter confusion matrix. Preschool children were shown a letter and were asked to name it. The rows show the letter presented, and the columns show what the child said, with the numbers showing how often each response was offered. Thus, the diagonal (the large numbers) represents correct responses. As you can see, “b” and “d” were highly confusable for these children.
   4. Figure 2.4. Letter features. These features are basic constituents of letters. “L” contains a horizontal line, vertical line, and a corner. “P” contains a vertical line and a semi‐circle, and so on. More features would be needed to capture all the letters in the Roman alphabet.
   5. Figure 2.5. Letter identification network. Letters are composed of constituents shown as activated nodes in this model of visual letter recognition.
   6. Figure 2.6. Visual representation of the sound of a spoken sentence. The author is saying “We're having bacon for breakfast.” Time moves left to right, and the vertical axis shows sound intensity. You can see the words “We're” and “having” blend together, and there is a break in the middle of the word “bacon.”
   7. Figure 2.7. Comparison of accents. The George Mason University speech accent archive (www.accent.gmu.edu) maintains a database of English speakers with different backgrounds, each uttering the same paragraph, shown at the left. The center panel shows the phonetic transcription of a 37‐year‐old Glasgow native, and at right, a Russian of the same age who has been learning English for one year. I've highlighted a few of the differences.
   8. Figure 2.8. Visual illusion. You've likely seen this illusion before, the point being that the central circles appear to be different sizes because of the surrounding circles. In a similar fashion, context influences how we evaluate speech sounds, so thinking about them in isolation is very difficult.
   9. Figure 2.9. First‐grade reading proficiency in European countries. The numbers are the average percentages of one‐syllable words that children could read correctly at the end of first grade. Portuguese, French, and Danish, like English, have less consistent mappings between sounds and letters than other languages do.
   10. Figure 2.10. Average results from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) administered to 10‐year‐olds around the world. The scale goes from 0‐1,000, with higher numbers reflecting better performance. The fourth‐graders in England, Portugal, and Denmark score quite well, even though first‐graders in those countries struggle with the difficult letter‐sound mapping. These results show that most children are able to learn the mapping.
4. Chapter 03
   1. Figure 3.1. Letters, sounds, and meaning.
   2. Figure 3.2. Letters, sounds, meaning, and spelling. Experienced readers can access word meaning not only through sound, but via another route that directly matches letters to knowledge of how words are spelled.
   3. Figure 3.3. How one might assume words are identified. The word on the page goes into the eye, then your mind figures out the letters, and then your mind puts the letters together to figure out what word they spell.
   4. Figure 3.4. How words are identified—a more complete model. The process that identifies the word can inform the process identifying letters; knowledge of what words are possible can constrain what letters might be on the page.
   5. Figure 3.5. Ambiguous letters. The “v” and the “u” in “volunteer” are the same shape. So are the “c” and the “e” in “clean.”
   6. Figure 3.6. Digits can substitute for letters.
   7. Figure 3.7. Silent reading. The sense that we hear a voice in our head when we read can be very strong.
5. Chapter 04
   1. Figure 4.1. Letters, sound, spelling, and meaning.
   2. Figure 4.2. Alternative representations for word definitions. Top, how we might imagine watermelon and apple are represented in the mind. Bottom, a more workable type of representation. Note that in each case we're looking at a more detailed view of the “word meanings” component of the model from Figure 4.1.
   3. Figure 4.3. A meaning network for the concept spill. Such a network represents the associations between active and related concepts.
   4. Figure 4.4. Words activate related words. This graph shows the time it took people to verify that each of two letter strings formed a word. Verification time was faster when the words were related, compared to when they were not.
   5. Figure 4.5. Expanded network of word meanings for spill.
6. Chapter 05
   1. Figure 5.1. Model of reading expanded to include sentence representations. The representation of sentence meaning is based on word meanings and rules of syntax.
   2. Figure 5.2. A cartoon of the mental representation of a simple sentence. Psychologists who study language use more complex (and more realistic) models of how the mind represents meaning, but this figure gives you the basic notion of simple ideas connecting.
   3. Figure 5.3. Mental representation of two sentences. The top part of the figure shows the representation of the previous sentence read (The juice in the trunk) and the new sentence just read. The bottom part of the figure shows the connection a reader would typically make. Both sentences contain the same referent, “juice,” so that would be the point of connection.
   4. Figure 5.4. Multiple sentences. The top part of the figure shows the growing mental representation of what's been read. The bottom shows the representation of the sentence just read. The reader must find a sensible place in the representation of what's been read to connect the new sentence.
   5. Figure 5.5. Model of reading expanded to include the idea‐web. The idea‐web is a representation of the ideas in the text, connected. There's an arrow going from the idea‐web to the sentence representation because the idea‐web—your ongoing understanding of the text—can influence how to interpret a particular sentence, as we saw in the “cut up a slice of cooked ham” example in Chapter 4.
   6. Figure 5.6. Model of reading expanded to include the situation model. The situation model is constructed from the ideas in the idea‐web, but can also be updated directly from ongoing processing of sentences. The situation model can also influence the interpretation of individual sentences, as well as their place in the idea‐web.
   7. Figure 5.7. Comparison of comprehension supported by reading skills or background knowledge. The graph shows how much readers remembered of a text about soccer. Kids identified as having “high verbal skills” remembered a bit more than kids with “low verbal skills” (compare the dark and light bars). But that effect is tiny compared to the effect of knowledge of soccer.
7. Chapter 06
   1. Figure 6.1. Reading virtuous cycle. The more you read, the more proficient a reader you are. Proficiency makes it easier to enjoy reading, and enjoying it make your attitude more positive, which prompts you to read more often.
   2. Figure 6.2. Reading virtuous cycle with self‐concept added.
8. Chapter 07
   1. Figure 7.1. Tree octopus. A screenshot from the website describing the fictitious tree octopus.
   2. Figure 7.2. Graph of word consumption. These are based on a national sample of adults. Note that the measure is “words,” so they might be spoken, sung, or written.
9. Conclusion
   1. Figure C.1. Model of reading.

Guide

1. Cover
2. Table of Contents
3. Begin Reading