Writing—this ingenious art to paint words and speech for the eyes.

GFORGES DE It RF BREUF (French poet, 1617-1661)

When he paid a visit to Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, Augustine observed a phenomenon that he judged strange enough to be worth noting in his memoirs:

When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”

In the middle of the seventh century, the theologian Isidore of Seville sim­ilarly marveled that “letters have the power to convey to us silently the sayings of those who are absent.” At the time, it was customary to read Latin aloud. To articulate sounds was a social convention, but also a true necessity: confronted with pages in which the words were glued together, without spaces, in a lan­guage that they did not know well, most readers had to mumble through the texts like young children. This is why Ambrose’s silent reading was so surpris­ing, even if for us it has become a familiar experience: we can read without articulating sounds.

Whether out, mind ever goes straight from the written word to its mean­ing without accessing pronunciation or whether it unconsciously transforms letters into sound and then sound into meaning has been the topic of consid­erable discussion The organization of the mental pathways for reading fueled a debate that divided the psychological community for over thirty years. Some thought that the transformation from print to sound was essential—written language, they argued, is just a by-product of spoken language, and we there­fore have to sound the words out, through a phonological route, before we have any hope of recovering their meaning. For others, however, phonologi­cal recoding was just a beginner’s trait characteristic of young readers. In more expert readers, reading efficiency was based on a direct lexical route straight from the letter string to its meaning.

Nowadays, a consensus has emerged: in adults, both reading routes exist, and both are simultaneously active. We all enjoy direct access to word mean­ing, which spares us from pronouncing words mentally before we can under­stand them. Nevertheless, even proficient readers continue to use the sounds of words, even if they are unaware of it. Not that we articulate words covertly—we do not have to move our lips, or even prepare an intention to do so. At a deeper level, however, information about the pronunciation of words is auto­matically retrieved. Both the lexical and phonological pathways operate in parallel and reinforce each other.

There is abundant proof that we automatically access speech sounds while we read. Imagine, for instance, that you are presented with a list of strings and have to decide whether each one is a real English word or not. Mind you, you only have to decide if the letters spell out an English word. Here you go:

rabbit

bountery

culdolt

money

dimon

karpit

nee

You perhaps hesitated when the letters sounded like a real word—as in “demon:’ “carpet:’ or “knee.” This interference effect can easily be measured in terms of response times. It implies that each string is converted into a sequence of sounds that is evaluated like a real word, even though the process goes against the requested task.

Mental conversion into sound plays an essential role when we read a word for the first time—say, the string “Kalashnikov.” Initially, we cannot possibly access its meaning directly, since we have never seen the word spelled out. All we can do is convert it into sound, find that the sound pattern is intelligible, and, through this indirect route, come to understand the new word. Thus, sounding is often the only solution when we encounter a new word. It is also indispens­able when we read misspelled words. Consider the little-known story by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Angel of the Odd.” In it, a strange character mysteriously intrudes into the narrator’s apartment, “a personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable,” and with a German accent as thick as British fog:

“Who are you, pray?” said 1, with much dignity, although somewhat puzzled; “how did you get here? And what is it you are talking about?”

`Az vor ow I com’d ere:’ replied the figure, “dat iz none of your pizzness; and as vor vat I be talking about, I be talk about vat I think proper; and as vor who I be, vy dat is de very ting I com’d here for to let you zee for yourzelf. . . Look at me! Zee! I am te Angel ov te Odd”

“And odd enough, too:’ I ventured to reply; “but I was always under the impression that an angel had wings.”

“‘le wing!” he cried, highly incensed, “vat I pe do mit to wing? Mein Gott! Do you take me vor a shicken?”

In reading this passage we return to a style we had long forgotten, one that dates back to our childhood: the phonological route, or the slow transforma­tion of totally novel strings of letters into sounds that miraculously become intelligible, as though someone were whispering them at us.

What about everyday words, however, that we have already met a thousand times? We do not get the impression that we slowly decode through mental enunciation. However, clever psychological tests show that we still activate their pronunciation at a nonconscious level For instance, suppose that you are asked to indicate which of the following words refer to parts of the human body. These are all very familiar words, so you should be able to focus on their meaning and neglect their pronunciation. Try it:

knee

leg

table

head

plane

bucket

hare

Perhaps you felt the urge to respond to the word “hare;’ which sounds like a body part. Experiments show that we slow down and make mistakes on words that sound like an item in the target category. It is not clear how we could recognize this homophony if we did not first mentally retrieve the word’s pro­nunciation. Only an internal conversion into speech sounds can explain this type of error. Our brain cannot help but transform the letters “h-a-r-e” into internal speech and then associate it with a meaning—a process that can go wrong in rare cases where the string sounds like another well-known word.

Of course, this imperfect design is also what grants us one of the great pleasures of life: puns or the “joy of text,” as the humorist Richard Lederer puts it. Without the gift of letter-to-sound conversion, we would not be able to enjoy Mae West’s wisecrack (“She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong”) or Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law’s quip (“there’s no police like Holmes”). Without Augustine’s “silent voice; [Ile pleasure of risqué double entendres would be denied us:

An admirer says to President Lincoln, “Permit me to introduce my family. My wife, Mrs. Bates. My daughter, Miss Bates. My son, Master Bates.”

 “Oh dear!” replied the president.

Further proof that our brain automatically accesses a word’s sound pat­terns derives from subliminal priming. Suppose that I flash the word “LATE” at you, immediately followed by the word “mate;’ and ask you to read the sec­ond word as fast as you can. The words are shown in a different case in order to avoid any low-level visual resemblance. Nevertheless, when the first word sounds and spells like the second, as in this example, we would observe a mas­sive acceleration of reading time, in comparison with a situation where two words are not particularly related to one another (“BOWL” followed by “mate”). Part of this facilitation clearly arises from similarity at the level of spelling alone. To flash “MATH” eases recognition of “mate; though the two strings sound quite different. However, crucially, even greater facilitation can be found when two words share the same pronunciation (“LATE” fol­lowed by “mate”), and this sound-based priming works even when spelling is completely different (“EIGHT” followed by “mate”). Thus, pronunciation seems to be automatically extracted. As one might expect, however, spelling and sound are not encoded at the same time. It takes only twenty or thirty milliseconds of word viewing for our brain to automatically ally activate a word’s spelling, but an additional forty milliseconds for its transformation into sound, as revealed by the emergence of sound-based priming.

Simple experiments thus lead us to outline a whole stream of successive stages in the reader’s brain, from marks on the retina to their conversion into letters and sounds. Any expert reader quickly converts strings into speech sounds effortlessly and unconsciously.

Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain’ by Stanislas Dehaene Page 25-29