Neuroscience, Alphabetics and Souns®

 Phonemic Awareness & Alphabetics 

“Sometimes the child knows the names of letters (ay, bee, see, dee..). Unfortunately, this knowledge, far from being helpful, may even delay the acquisition of reading. To know that “s” is pronounced ess , “k” kay and “i” eye is useless when we try to read the work “ski.” Letter names cannot be assembled during reading-the hookup only concerns phonemes. But phonemes are rather abstract and covert speech units. A true mental revolution will have to take place before the child finds out that speech can be broken down into phonemes, and that the sound ba is made up of two such units, the phonemes /b/ and /a/.” ~by: Stanislas Dehaene Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read

“Although both reading and speech require some degree of mastery of language, reading requires, in addition, a mastery of the alphabetic principle. This entails an awareness of the internal phonological structure of the words of the language, an awareness  that must be more explicit than is ever demanded in the ordinary course of listening and responding to speech.  If this is so, it should follow that beginning learners with a weakness in phonological awareness would be at risk.” p. 2 The Alphabetic Principle and Learning to Read by: Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman,

“Knowing the rules of a given language for letter-sound or grapheme-phoneme correspondence is the essence of the alphabetic principle, and becoming expert in these connections changes the way the brain functions.The person who hasn’t learned these rules has a different brain by adulthood, a brain that is less precisely attuned to the sounds of his or her own language.  p. 150  Proust and the Squid by Marianne Wolf

“Phonemic awareness instruction helped all types of children improve their reading, including normally developing readers, children at risk for future reading problems, disabled readers, preschoolers, kindergarteners, 1st graders, chidren in 2nd through 6th grades (most of whom were disabled readers), children across various SES levels, and children learning to read in English as well as other languages.” p. 2-5
Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction
by: The National Reading Panel

Neuroscience

“Upon entering the retina, a word is split up into a myriad of fragments, as each part of the visual image is recognized by a distinct photoreceptor. Starting from this input, the real challenge consists in putting the pieces back together in order to decode what letters are present, to figure out the order in which they appear, and finally identify the word.”  p.12 Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene

“…what can psychology and neuroscience recommend to teachers and parents who wish to optimize reading instruction? …we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal, the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby each letter or grapheme represents a phoneme.” p. 228 Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene

Hands-on, meaningful learning using Souns® helps bring the abstract world of literacy into the concrete realm, making it tangible and accessible for all children.   “The work of Maria Montessori and Jean Piaget confirms, what the hand experiences, the mind remembers.” p. 4 Souns for Literacy: Language and Literacy Develop Hand in Hand by: Brenda Erickson

History

Evidence that the brain is a pattern decoder is described on page 72 of Pinker’s work Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language.  “Children make errors such as blowed and knowed more often than for any other kind of irregular verb.”  These errors are not made because of poor modeling.  The errors are made because the brain has picked up on patterns in the language and applies them to new situations.”

“In Dehaene’s evolutionary terms, early pictographic symbols, which utilized known shapes in the external world, ‘recycled’ the circuits used for object recognition and naming.” p. 33 Proust and the Squid by Marianne Wolf

“After many centuries people discovered that they could even turn their pictures into symbols that represented the sounds of their language… These ‘sound pictures’ are called letters, written symbols standing for the sounds that make up all of our words.” p. 6-7 Ox, House, Stick: The History of Our Alphabet by Don Robb

“Dehaene and his group argue that the same areas used for recognizing snakes, plows and moons come to be used for recognizing letters.”  p. 33 Proust and the Squid by Marianne Wolf

Why does Souns work?

The brain does not read an entire word at one time as a “word picture.”  Rather, each letter or group of letters is a “sound picture.” The sound pictures are then decoded to reveal the word.  The latest neuroscience proves this to be so.

“Upon entering the retina, a word is split up into a myriad of fragments, as each part of the visual image is recognized by a distinct photoreceptor. Starting from this input, the real challenge consists in putting the pieces back together in order to decode what letters are present, to figure out the order in which they appear, and finally identify the word.”  p.12 Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene

“After many centuries people discovered that they could even turn their pictures into symbols that represented the sounds of their language… These ‘sound pictures’ are called letters, written symbols standing for the sounds that make up all of our words.” p. 6-7 Ox, House, Stick: The History of Our Alphabet by Don Robb