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Automatization is really a central concept in fluent reading.
Automatization is composed of two parts: speed and accuracy.
To be able to understand the text, a reader needs to have automatic word
recognition processes, which mean very fast accessing to the phonological and
orthographic representation of the words, and accurateness of this access.
This is precisely what is lacking in dyslexic readers,
(who) are always in a very complicated situation
of what we called a 'double task' when they are reading.
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Because the decoding is not sufficiently automatized in dyslexic readers,
they are always doing two tasks at the same time.
One is decoding the word, which takes a lot of attention, and
the other one is constructing the meaning of the sentence or
the text, which also takes a lot of attention.
So the attention of the dyslexic readers is always divided between those two very
difficult tasks, whereas in the fluent reader the identification of word is so
automatic that there is a lot of attention that can be devoted to
the comprehension of the meaning of the text, the understanding of the text.
Studies done among others by Charles Perfetti and Keith Stanovich have shown
that good readers do not use the context to guess a word or
to identify a word, because the process of word
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recognition, word identification, is so fast that
the meaning of the word comes before the context can be used to actually guess or
to help understanding that word.
It is only poor readers who rely on the context to compensate for
the difficulty in accessing, quickly and accurately, the meaning of a word.
The level of automatization of word reading is
actually extremely deep in fluent readers,
as was shown by Stanislas Dehaene and
his collaborators in experiment(s) called (the) subliminal priming effect.
So a subliminal priming effect, what does that mean?
That means that the participant is seeing a prime for a few milliseconds,
which is short enough so that the prime is actually processed by the brain.
(That's what they've shown.)
But the participant remained completely unconscious that this prime,
this word, or this color, has been shown to him or her.
Because right after the prime comes a mask or a target word.
And Dehaene and collaborators have shown that
the subliminal priming effect which is that when you present a word as the prime
for a few milliseconds and the person is completely unaware to have seen that word.
Even if they are being asked, even if they are being said that they were presented
with a word as a prime, they are totally unable to say what word it was or
whether it was a real word or a string of random consonants.
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the participant has to say whether what he or she sees is a word or not a word.
The rapid automatized naming test simply consists in naming
colors or digits or pictures as quickly as possible.
What studies have shown for the last 30 years is that dyslexic
are much slower compared to non-dyslexic, and this is not a problem of vocabulary.
This really seems to be a problem of accessing the phonological
representation of the word, the label of the word, how you pronounce it.
And you can imagine that when reading a text if dyslexic
people are slowed down in their ability to access the phonological representation of
the words they are reading, this is accumulating as they are reading and
this causes difficulties in speed and accuracy.
Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
