Submitted to South African Journal of Applied Language Studies, 26 November 2013 as Tracking down automaticity in eye movement records of reading in isiZulu Receipt was acknowledged, but apart from assurances from the editor that the review process is underway, no communication relating an editorial decision has yet been received.
A BSTRACT
Automaticity, or instant recognition of units of language represented in combinations of letters is essential for proficient reading in any language. This study of competent adult first language readers of Zulu explored eye movement patterns in conjunction with a process of stimulated recall. It aimed to discover which words were immediately recognised, and what factors were associated with immediate recognition or its opposite, active decoding.
Almost 25% of words in the texts read were immediately recognised by most readers.
Averaging 6.5 letters in length, these words tended to be shorter than average word length in the texts, and most consisted of not more than two morphemes. Recurring words were recognised immediately at some points in the text and not at others, indicating that factors such as position, collocations, context, and the construction of a mental representation of the meaning of text may be salient in word recognition.
Conversely, almost 24% of words appeared to require cognitive work to decipher. Averaging 11.1 letters, these were longer than average, and most consisted of between three and five morphemes. Findings suggest that the agglutinative structure and conjoined writing system of isiZulu may be less conducive to the development and exercise of automaticity than orthographies of disjunctive languages.
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I NTRODUCTION
Recent years have seen a surge of policy support for the use of indigenous languages in Africa (Trudell 2010), but literature searches do not yet yield much relating to reading in African languages, where many questions are still to be answered. This paper is a
contribution to this field, and reports on a study of automaticity among competent readers of isiZulu, the most widely spoken indigenous South African language.
When the telegraph system was invented, operating clerks surprised observers with the speed at which they learned to decode Morse code without referring to the key (Gleick 2011). In spontaneously developing this skill, they demonstrated the keenness of human perception of patterns, and our capacity to interpret them.
The Morse code clerks‟ achievement might seem an estimable cognitive feat; yet the fluent, competent reading of printed text that proficient readers take for granted is even more so.
“Reading is arguably the most complex cognitive activity in which humans routinely engage”
state Reichle, Warren and McConnell (2009) (2009, p. 1) and offer, in “a gross simplification”, a description of the activity of reading:
Upon moving the eyes to a new location on the printed page, visual features from the input are propagated from the eyes to portions of the visual system which extract their shapes and locations in order to generate visual representations of both individual letters and words (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003). Some small portion of these features are selected through attention (McConkie & Rayner, 1975; Rayner, 1975) and then rapidly converted into non-visual representations, including the orthographic and phonological codes that correspond to a word‟s spelling and pronunciation,
respectively, and the codes that correspond to a word‟s meaning and syntactic category (e.g., see Taft, 1991). At some point while this is happening, enough information will have accrued from the fixation to warrant moving the eyes to a new location; at this point, the oculomotor system uses the information about word boundaries available in peripheral vision to begin programming a saccade to move the eyes to another location.
While this saccade is being programmed, the lexical information that has become available will be integrated with whatever syntactic and/or semantic information has
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been extracted from previously identified words to build a representation of the sentence (Frazier, 1998) and whatever situation is being described by the larger text (Kintsch, 1988). And finally, while this integration is being completed, the systems involved in visual and lexical processing are directed towards the next unidentified word, causing both the eyes and attention to move down the line of text.
(Reichle, Warren and McConnell, 2009, p. 1)
Different models of the reading process offer varying accounts of how skills such as these cohere. Although debate continues about exactly how this happens, it is clear that when these skills become automatic and integrated into the relaxed, swift exercise that silent reading can be, readers need give little attention to the complex process of retrieving information from the code of print, and give their attention almost entirely to the information itself.
Central to any fluent interpretation of symbols to language is automaticity, or reliance on learnt associations between clusters of symbols and units of language, so that on perception of the symbols, associated pieces of language are immediately available to the reader without the need for active cognitive processing. In reading text, automaticity is instant recognition of familiar print patterns as representing particular units of language and their meanings
(Penner-Wilger, 2008). With automaticity, we can, in a series of brief visual fixations from which clear perceptions of some printed symbols, and only indistinct impressions of others is gained, rapidly register the meaning of successive clusters of symbols, building our
understanding of what the writer intended to communicate as we do so.
Automaticity is regarded as crucial in the competent exercise of literacy skills by Helen Abadzi whose many recent publications linking discoveries in neuroscience to reading have significantly influenced understanding of reading processes and literacy learning. Abadzi describes automaticity as a “vaccine”, and an “on-off switch” for literacy (2011), meaning that without it, literacy skills cannot enable competent reading.
Literature searches reveal a prodigious amount of literature about all aspects of reading in English, and a substantial body on comparisons of literacy learning across languages, but much less on aspects of competent reading across different orthographies and languages.
In this study, eye movement records are used to explore competent readers‟ silent reading of authentic continuous texts in isiZulu, the most widely spoken indigenous South African
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language, and in this paper, the records are analysed with particular reference to indications of automaticity.