ABSTRACT
The problem of reading seems straightforward: readers learn to “decode” the visual input into a linguistic representation, and “then” use that representation as input to normal mechanisms of spoken language understanding. So, to teach effective reading, all we need to do is inculcate an initial linguistic representation of the visual symbols, and language understanding mechanisms will do the rest. Phonics and “whole word” training are examples of this teaching paradigm: teach a kid the sounds of letters or of whole words, and his/her knowledge of auditory sentence processing will do the rest. Simple support for this view is the common idea that as we read, we “hear” an internal rendering of what we are reading. That is, reading involves first decoding what we see into sounds and then applying our normal mechanisms of speech comprehension to those internally generated sound sequences.
