ABSTRACT
Learning to read is in some respects like learning a new language. The normal child who comes to school from an English-speaking home has acquired an oral vocabulary of approximately twenty-five hundred words and is to some extent able to understand spoken sentences made up of words which he himself cannot use. When he begins to read, he is confronted with symbols which, while they represent familiar words, are in themselves quite as strange to him as the words of an unknown language. The child’s first reading lessons are designed to teach him how to attach spoken words to written or printed symbols. If the elements of the mental association involved in early reading are represented by letters, W may stand for the written word, S for the spoken word, and M for the meaning of the word. Learning to read consists in its earliest stages in the establishment of the association W-SM. The final stage in learning to read is that in which the written or printed word calls up the meaning directly without the intermediate link, 5. The association in the case of a fluent reader consists in the close combination of two elements, WM.
