Why Is Speech So Much Easier Than Reading and Writing?

Abstract

About 25 years ago, some ofmy colleagues posed the question that was, in their view, basic to an understanding of the reading process and the ills that so frequently attend it: what must the would-be reader know that mastery of speech will not have taught him? Drawing on a combination of common sense, old knowledge about language, and new knowledge about speech, they arrived at the hypothesis that a missing and necessary condition was what has come to be called phonological awareness-that is, a conscious understanding that words come apart into consonants and vowels. Research then demonstrated that such awareness is not normally present in preliterate children or illiterate adults; that measures of awareness provide, perhaps, the best single predictor of reading achievement; and that training designed to develop awareness has generally happy consequences for those who receive it. But the pioneers of phonological awareness rather neglected the flip side of their inquiry: why is phonological awareness not necessary for speech? My aim is to repair that omission. To that end, I will seek reasons, in addition to those my colleagues found, why the phonologic struc­ tures that are COmDlon to speaker and hearer are nevertheless not noticed by either. Beyond fur­ ther rationalizing the hypothesis-now a fact-that phonological awareness is not a normal by­ product oflearning to speak, those reasons should lay bare the critical difference between speech and reading/writing, and so let us see why the one is so much easier than the other. Moreover, when taken together with considerations haVing to do with the operation of the phonological fa­ cility, they may enlarge our understanding of certain deficiencies that poor readers have, apart from the process ofreading itself (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989). I begin, however, not with notions about why speech does not require awareness, but rather with some speculations about why that aspect ofthe issue was initially scanted. That is surely a chancy and presumptuous thing for me to do, for I cannot expect researchers to have written about the questions they never raised, so I cannot know whether my colleagues did not think to ask them, or did not think them fit to ask. I will therefore rely on what I know of the awareness issue as it developed in the mind of Isabelle Liberman, one of the pioneers of the awareness enterprise. Because Isabelle habitually used me as a sounding board, I was privy to the intellectual trial and error that led to the insights behind her signal contributions. I remember the hits and the misses, the turns, both right and Wrong, and, of particular interest for the purposes ofthis essay, the turns not made at all because they lay on roads not taken. It all began for Isabelle when, in order to accommodate her career to the constraints of the University's nepotism rule, she was assigned to teach teachers how children learn to read, and why some don't. She had not, at that point, done research in the field, and was unacquainted with the literature, but she wasnotietheless determined that her teaching be grounded in reasonably solid science. She therefore undertook a two-part program. First, she took stock of what she, and presumably every other educated person, knew about speech and language that might be relevant, carefully selecting ollly those facts and generalizations that were firmly ••