Nonword literacy
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Upon first hearing, the very idea sounded preposterous, but when I searched the internet, I found it all over the place as "nonword reading / repetition", "nonsense words", "non word phonics / fluency", "non-word decoding", "pseudowords", etc. In other words (!), it's a real thing, and lots of people take the concept seriously as a supposedly useful device in reading theory and practice, justifying it thus:
"as a tool to assess phonetic decoding ability" (here)
"contribute to children's ability to learn new words" (here)
"a true indicator of the alphabetic principle and basic phonics" (here)
etc., etc., etc.
I would not have taken the topic of nonwords seriously and posted on it, had not AntC pointed out that it is actually being applied in the classroom in New Zealand.
the reported evidence is based on children’s ability to read non-words, and their ability to read words was not consistently assessed. The report suggests that the approaches are successful in teaching children to blend sounds together to decode words. What is not clear yet is if learning to decode benefited children’s writing and comprehension more than current methods.
The back story: New Zealand has a new Government as of late last year. They're now getting into their stride of changing everything the previous administration had initiated, including of course education. This week they've announced a new initiative. What this 'new' masks is that by cutting in-progress initiatives, they're effectively reducing the overall education budget for literacy skills. 'Expert commentary' here — including from Dr. Jesson.
The idea of "sounding out" nonsinoglyphs made me chuckle. It reminded me of Xu Bing's "A Book from the Sky" that consists solely of characters that look real but that he had made up out of thin air. These nonsense characters drove literate Chinese readers mad with frustration when they tried to make sense of them. They also remind me of the "junk characters" we recently discussed, which — although "real" (they exist in some hyper arcane glossary or occurred once in the whole of history in an obscure manuscript, etc.) — their sound and meaning are known not even to one out of a million literate persons. Do Xu Bing's made-up glyphs and the Kangxi's junk characters have an analogous function to the nonwords of English reading theory?
Selected readings
- "Unhinged on phonics" (7/26/07)
- "Phonics" (12/30/06)
- "'Book from the Ground'" (12/5/12)
- "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20)
- "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
- "'Book from the Ground'" (12/5/12)
- "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
- "How to generate fake Chinese characters automatically" (12/30/15)
- "Cucurbits and junk characters" (3/30/24)
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 16, 2024 @ 10:28 am
Non-words are a very standard methodology across all subdomains of linguistics, for a variety of reasons. Thousands of studies use it. You may want to look up one of the earlier and more seminal studies about wugs.
Michèle Sharik Pituley said,
May 16, 2024 @ 10:30 am
So are they judging literacy based on Jabberwocky?
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 16, 2024 @ 10:33 am
Oh, re the last paragraph: Non-words are absolutely not limited to research into reading; I would guess it's a rather small subset. They are mainly used in basic (rather than applied) research phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax. In principle, the linguistic structure (most usually, phonemic shape) must be available to the participants in some way. Thus, I wouldn't think it's doable using Chinese characters; but if someone knows it is, please tell us.
Michèle Sharik Pituley said,
May 16, 2024 @ 10:40 am
Jarek, thanks for the link to wugs. That test, & the rest of the Wikipedia article are fascinating.
Helen DeWitt said,
May 16, 2024 @ 11:33 am
I seem to remember that this was basically the way a friend's nieces and nephews were taught to read Hebrew in the Lubavitch community – the emphasis was on learning to read the text aloud at great speed, which they could indeed do, without understanding. This makes sense in a context where the act of reciting various blessings, prayers, and other texts in prescribed situations matters, and understanding what's said does not affect the validity of the recital – to be honest there are MANY situations where you're grateful for someone who can cover the ground quickly. But I do slightly wonder whether those who work on nonsense literacy are aware of how easy it is to, not sure how to put this, put the brain in sight-reading mode if you're in the habit of focusing on deciphering.
Benjamin Ernest Orsatti said,
May 16, 2024 @ 12:05 pm
Helen,
Oh, let's not be too hard on the Lubavitchers — the Chabadniks in the Squirrell Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, for example, can daven like prescription drug side-effect voice-overs, but kavvanah is always the goal, as, for example, wherever the shma prayer is concerned.
But you're right, the mitzvah is in the "doing" not the "feeling", which is somewhat of a more mystical and less mundane way of thinking about things.
Helen DeWitt said,
May 16, 2024 @ 12:30 pm
Benjamin, I didn't mean to be hard on them! Or to imply that understanding would not be seen as a good thing! My impression was that competent sightreading was seen as an achievable goal, one that was necessary for various kinds of performance.
Brian said,
May 16, 2024 @ 1:09 pm
As a child, I once was administered a test that had a short section in which you were shown nonwords and asked to pronounce them. I found the idea fascinating, as it made me aware that I had already absorbed a lot of intuitive rules for deducing pronunciation without consciously realizing it. After the test was over, I actually asked the tester if there was a list of other nonwords, somewhere, that I could examine on my own time — but they didn't know of any such resource. I could have happily spent hours going through such a list.
J.M.G.N. said,
May 16, 2024 @ 1:29 pm
Furbustuous, lotticks, izzids, happaps, and gabonmang…
David Marjanović said,
May 16, 2024 @ 2:02 pm
Indeed, two of the characters in the Book from the Sky turned out to be accidentally recreated junk characters later (as I probably learned here).
C Baker said,
May 16, 2024 @ 2:31 pm
This is something typically used to help diagnose children with dyslexia, who may have memorized the appearance of common words but still not be able to sound out unfamiliar ones with any degree of fluency. If a child can apparently read the words "cat" and "horse" and "elephant" but can't even take a stab at "wug" or "fip" or "ot" then you know there's a problem.
GeorgeW said,
May 16, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
@Helen DeWitt: Years ago, in Saudi Arabia, I took a Qur'anic Arabic course at a local university. I was the only non-Muslim in the class made up primarily of South Asians. I was shocked to realize that they could read and recite the Qur'an very well, but understand hardly a word of what they were reading. I mostly understood the texts, but was slow on pronunciation.
AntC said,
May 16, 2024 @ 4:42 pm
@Jarek Non-words are a very standard methodology across all subdomains of linguistics, …
Thank you for those examples. What surprised me was that literacy testing stopped at the ability to 'decode' (sound out) non-words. There seemed no wug-like test of ability to internalise rules of morphology. There was no comprehension test to riff on what do wugs eat?
C.B. This is something typically used to help diagnose children with dyslexia, who may have memorized the appearance of common words but still not be able to sound out unfamiliar ones with any degree of fluency. If a child can apparently read the words "cat" and "horse" and "elephant" …
Yes, I can think of somebody in my family who had a form of dyslexia this would have detected. I'd hardly call that a test of literacy, though. In particular, kids arriving in NZ from the Pacific Islands may never have seen a horse, certainly not an elephant. Those words would be as much nonsense as 'wug'.
Here's further coverage in a NZ context (that arrived after my contacting Prof Mair). Also briefly compares Australia and U.S. literacy rates. It's quite a nuanced discussion, so I won't try to summarise.
Phil H said,
May 16, 2024 @ 8:38 pm
I use this all the time, teaching English to Chinese speakers. Even though they have in theory learned pinyin romanisation, a lot of Chinese schoolchildren are not competent at sounding out strings of letters, so it takes quite a lot of practice in the early stages just to get the the idea of putting sounds in sequence. I have made props to make it more real for them: a phonics wheel consisting of three wooden wheels with letters taped on, arranged on an axle in C-V-C order. Young children love spinning the wheels and yelling "lop" "dug" "wiv" "nam" etc.
It seems to help them with overcoming the scariness of being faced with alien text, and makes the next stage, teaching meaning, a bit more straightforward.
Tim Leonard said,
May 16, 2024 @ 9:21 pm
It's not really relevant to this discussion, but the idea of fluently reading non-words seems very like sight-reading instrumental music. Music has not just notes (phonemes), but enough morphology so that some sequences are part of a musical "language" and are therefore easy to sight-read, and others are not and are therefore very difficult to sight-read. "Grammatical" sequences even imply emphasis and phrasing, to some extent.
C Baker said,
May 16, 2024 @ 11:05 pm
But AntC, why do you think they should be teaching the English as a second language at the same time they're teaching reading to all students? This does not make sense.
Chas Belov said,
May 16, 2024 @ 11:19 pm
I viewed Xi Bing's "A Book from the Sky" when it was on display at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum many years ago. I believe I was already starting to learn some Chinese characters (I don't think I've ever made it above 300 and I've forgotten many of them) and found the exhibit fascinating.
AntC said,
May 17, 2024 @ 12:16 am
@C.B. teaching the English as a second language
They're teaching kids in NZ; so the kids are going to be exposed to English every day, even if that's not the main language used in their home. I agree trying to crash together remedial English teaching with TESL is pretty terrible; there are TESL evening classes, but probably unaffordable for these kids. That article I linked to says
I'm not trying to defend or rationalise what's going on, merely understand it. And a large part of the explanation may be they're doing their best against constant budget cutbacks, politicised meddling [**] of 'basic skills' education, and a dire shortage of qualified teachers. On the ground, I suspect much of the 'one-on-one' is from teaching assistants/trainees/parent volunteers.
[**] "we've got to stop treating this subject as a political football" quoted from one Deputy Principal.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 17, 2024 @ 1:27 am
@AntC There seemed no wug-like test of ability to internalise rules of morphology. There was no comprehension test to riff on what do wugs eat?
Well, these reports are media reports for the general public, so god only knows what really happened ;) In my experience, media reports tend to mangle research more often than not (as has been demonstrated on LL multiple times). But I do admit I've only had a very very cursory look.
I really don't know about reading research, but in phonetics and phonology, non-words are used to study production and perception with a view to avoiding certain effects typical for real words (e.g. frequency and familiarity) but also e.g. to serve valid structures that are just accidental gaps in the lexicon (for example, we used non-words in a recent vowel production study because the language in question didn't have — as is usually the case btw — the full set of vowels in the same consonantal frame in real words).
The original wug study aimed to avoid the familiarity effect and test generalization in production. And it does not need to be administered in writing. In fact, it tests morphonology where the orthography actually makes life more difficult (since the spelling is always s for two different pronunciations).
It's quite elegant, and now I see that the Wikipedia entry says that "[a]ccording to Ratner and Menn, "As an enduring concept in psycholinguistic research, the wug has become generic, like [kleenex] or [xerox], a concept so basic to what we know and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins… Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research."" I think that is quite true for our students of "English studies"; if they know one experimental linguistics study, then this is it.
AG said,
May 17, 2024 @ 2:58 am
Reminds me of the Dr. Seuss book "There's a Wocket in my Pocket". The illustrations always made it quite clear what, for example, a Wocket was. Except for the unseen / possibly amorphous "Vug under the rug". *shudder*
AntC said,
May 17, 2024 @ 2:59 am
these reports are media reports for the general public
I tried to link to articles authored by academics/'expert commentary', even if published in general media. See also Prof Mair's links from professionals in the field.
but in phonetics and phonology …
I think we're talking at cross-purposes: educators take the phonetics and phonology of English as a given. English just does have gaps in the lexicon. And bizarre spelling rules that have the effect that there may well be a word whose pronunciation fits into some gap, but whose spelling is unexpected. To take one example from Prof Mair's links: why is the fish (on the chart accompanied by a picture of a fish) not spelled 'kod' — which appears — but 'cod' — which doesn't? Compare 'cid' vs 'kid'. 'kettle' vs 'cattle'.
I should perhaps add why I'm trying to understand: I never had difficulty with reading; I was a voracious reader from the get go. A close family member with just as much parental support struggled for many years; but managed to cover it up in early years by merely memorising all the whole-words presented. I'm not at all sure that ruse would have gotten detected by the nonsense words test — if it had existed at the time: they'd be pretty smart at learning the whole-word nonsense spelling as well, with no appreciation it wasn't a word. Their spelling to this day is terrible; they accept auto-corrupt offerings without question; so in reading stuff from them I constantly need to cast around for soundalikes.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 17, 2024 @ 3:48 am
@AntC I think we're talking at cross-purposes: educators take the phonetics and phonology of English as a given. — We may well be. In my first posts, I was reacting to Prof. Mair's surprise and wanted to point out that non-words are all over the place in linguistics research. Look at the second paper linked (yes that one is an actual study; I missed that, my bad!): from a quick scan it seems to show that what they call "nonword repetition skill" predicts new word learning success. In other words, they tested how children did on non-word repetition (from audio, btw; no reading involved!), and were able to show that how good you are at this correlates with how successfully you learn new words.
This is like studying the function of the circulatory system. Educators may take is "as a given" but it doesn't stop nerdy types from researching it ;) with or without an applied aspect.
I'm not at all sure that ruse would have gotten detected by the nonsense words test — if it had existed at the time — Well, the wug thing goes back to the 1950s… Again, I don't know enough about reading research, but I suspect that the "ruse" would actually be detected by a good study. In other words, you would be better than the other person at reading non-words since the point is you can't rely on whole-word memorization for stuff you have never seen before.
Regarding the kod thing — from a quick look at that article it seems that this is in a worksheet aimed at teaching English orthography. The fact is that, through historical accident, the fish is actually spelled cod in standard English orthography (and this is what is meant by the phrase "real fish"). The article's claim that this is "cruel" is quite silly, I think. You might argue that what is cruel is English orthography. The worksheet just tries to teach a socially useful and valuable skill, i.e. spelling things in standard ways. You need to to talk to Philip Taylor about this ;) This is just a different skill (particularly in a deep orthography like English) from "phonetic" (which in fact means "phonological") decoding. There's quite some way from knowledge about how the world functions to how things get taught in the school system…
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 17, 2024 @ 3:51 am
BTW I hereby claim copyright on "Inglish spelling iz kruel". T-shurts and mugz forthkumming!
Philip Taylor said,
May 17, 2024 @ 5:12 am
English spelling may well be cruel, Jarek, but for some of us it is a very powerful motivator. Which is why, for me "English" has always been /ˈeŋ ɡlɪʃ/, "England" /ˈeŋ ɡlənd/ and so on [*]. And why I wince when someone on the radio says /ɪn ˈvʌn ər‿əb |əl/, or when my satellite navigation system tell me to turn left onto /ˈhəʊmz deɪəl/ Road ("Holmesdale") — in fact, I often do more than just wince, and verbally correct the offending speaker, despite knowing full well that he/she/it neither hears nor cares.
[*] But there are exceptions, such as "conduit" — taught /ˈkʌn dɪt/ at school at the age of 9 or thereabouts, I therefore wince when I hear /ˈkɒn dju‿ɪt/. So does this suggest that I was never taught the correct British pronunciation of "English" (etc), or merely that I was taught it but refused to accept it on principle ?
Chris Button said,
May 17, 2024 @ 5:55 am
So, like Dr Seuss books then?
David Marjanović said,
May 17, 2024 @ 7:13 am
Is the voice American? Because there that's standard: aluminum foierl!
Terry Hunt said,
May 17, 2024 @ 7:51 am
As a sidetrack from real-world pedagogy, this general concept is of great interest to Science Fiction and Fantasy writers, who may need to invent words in some alien or far future language, and want to make them both easily pronouncible to readers and stylistically consistent and plausible as real language. Where two or more contrasting fictional languages are involved, the task becomes harder.
A philologist also known for Fantasy fiction, one Professor J.R.R.Tolkien, was rather good at this; in the Science Fiction realm, Jack Vance was a master of it. I often read or re-read his novels not just for their stories, but for the inventiveness and elegance of his prose style, though I understand it may not appeal to everyone.
Rodger C said,
May 17, 2024 @ 10:19 am
Philip, do you really say /ˈeŋ ɡlɪʃ/ and not /ɪˈŋ ɡlɪʃ/, which has been standard for a number of centuries?
Rodger C said,
May 17, 2024 @ 10:21 am
*/'ɪŋ ɡlɪʃ/
Philip Taylor said,
May 17, 2024 @ 12:02 pm
David, no, pure British English. My problem is primarily with the silent "l" (/ˈhəʊmz/, not /ˈhəʊlmz/) but also with the first vowel (/əʊ/, not /oʊ/)
Rodger, yes, because I learned the word when I first started reading, not when I first heard someone else say it — I was reading from before the age of four, but cannot say with any certainty when I first heard someone else pronounce the word. For much the same reason I initially pronounced "foliage" as /ˈfɔɪ lɪdʒ / (having clearly mis-read it), but I have a feeling that this pronunciation was corrected by my mother, although she never corrected my /ˈeŋ ɡlɪʃ/ as far as I am aware..
MattF said,
May 17, 2024 @ 12:10 pm
Wikipedia offers a set of non-words for the various non-verbal events and effects that can occur in comics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexicon_of_Comicana
Jerry Packard said,
May 17, 2024 @ 2:42 pm
Nonsense words are used to diagnose dyslexia (congenital reading disability) and alexia (loss of reading ability due to brain damage).
Patients with surface dyslexia can read regular words, novel words and nonsense words, but not irregular words. Patients with phonological dyslexia can read irregular words but not regular, novel or nonsense words. Patients with deep dyslexia read words incorrectly, as semantically related words – like reading ‘tiger’ as ‘cat.’
Note that these diagnostic categories rarely occur in ‘pure’ form, and occur instead as tendencies. These diagnostic categories apply in Chinese and Japanese as well as in alphabetic orthographies.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 17, 2024 @ 2:52 pm
Thank you @Jerry Packard, much appreciated! So how would this work for nonsense words in Chinese? Combining characters that don't normally go together? With the limited number of syllables, is it at all possible to make non-words the way you would in a language with a more liberal phonotactics (think wug)?
Jerry Packard said,
May 17, 2024 @ 3:28 pm
@Jarek
Yes, nonsense characters/words would be using common semantic and phonetic radicals to construct characters that don’t occur.
Karl Weber said,
May 17, 2024 @ 4:19 pm
Since Dr Seuss and "nonsense characters" are in play here, I must mention ON BEYOND ZEBRA, Seuss's 1955 picture book proposing 20 letters to supplement the 26 characters recognized in English.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
May 17, 2024 @ 9:24 pm
Testing for kindergarten readiness, which includes no words, from the LA Times:
This month in her transitional kindergarten class at L.A. Unified, student Maria Arriaga will be timed to see how many uppercase and lowercase letters she can name in a minute. She’ll be tested to see if she can sound out nonsense words like vot, pag and lem, and asked to read sight words like young, speak and known.
It’s a test intended for kindergarteners, but Maria is only 4 years old.
This year, for the first time, all TK students at LAUSD will be required to take the Kindergarten Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS for short,
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-14/lausd-wants-transitional-kindergarteners-to-test-parents-uproar
Barbara Phillips Long said,
May 17, 2024 @ 9:28 pm
“Nonwords,” not “no words.” Sorry.
I thought perhaps I had mistyped, but it turns out to be a spellcheck issue.
Peter Taylor said,
May 18, 2024 @ 3:00 am
Pseudowords are also used in various cognitive rehabilitation exercises. I don't know the details – I develop software for neuropsychologists, but am not one myself – but off the top of my head I do know that in selective attention exercises (pay attention and select the things which match a given criterion) they sometimes use words as the things and sometimes pseudowords (and sometimes pictures, sounds, other stimuli…). I think there are one or two other exercises I've been asked to make over the years which use pseudowords too.
Victor Mair said,
May 18, 2024 @ 6:05 am
The dual mission of Language Log
Part of a comment by katarina to this post:
"The Miracle of Western Writing" (12/31/23)
=====
For a non-linguist, I am very glad this is Language Log and not Linguistics Log, because we can learn, through the LL postings, so much about language as well as about culture and civilization.
=====
That goes for all those posts about Arabic and the vernaculars (especially part 5 and the one on Maltese), tones and intonation, topolects and dialects, Taiwanese and Cantonese and Mandarin and Sinitic, plus countless other discussions and debates that take place on these pages.
Language AND Linguistics
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 18, 2024 @ 9:15 am
@Jerry Packard Yes, nonsense characters/words would be using common semantic and phonetic radicals to construct characters that don’t occur.
OK, but these wouldn't be pronounceable the way wug is?
Jerry Packard said,
May 18, 2024 @ 10:46 am
@Jarek
Yes, there are no pronounceable but non-occurring, unless they are asked to repeat syllables like *tin, which would not be a test of reading.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 20, 2024 @ 5:33 am
@Jerry Perfect! So that is the difference between the understanding of non-words like in the original post (for reading instruction/research) where we actually deal with orthography, and the understanding more typical in other fields, which would absolutely involve repetition (cf. the second link in the OP) where we deal with pronounceable (thus at least phonologically well-formed) but unattested strings of phonemes.
Araucaria said,
May 21, 2024 @ 1:50 pm
Because English spelling is absolutely awful orthographically – for various reasons that may be interesting for linguists and historians, but not much to people who have to deal with the thin end of the wedge – the art of learning to read in English has little to do with "decoding" of the type that could be done with nonsense words. Nobody knows how to pronounce the word "READ", for example, which could be /ri:d/ or /red/ in Southern Standard British English.
What learners need to do in real life is use an inadvertently acquired probabilistic metric to match the items that they see to the phonetic words they know. And to do this they primarily use pragmatic skills, not knowledge about sound-spelling correspondences to determine the matching process.
This has little, if any, relationship with reading nonsense words in IPA script, and shouldn't ever be confused with it.
My daughter (six) had a nonsense word recently that could have been pronounced in several ways. It was probably intended to have a 'magic E' spelling at the end. My daughter gave it a Greek e instead – which was entirely plausible given the spelling and given one of her favourite words to read: 'recipe'.
My point is that the whole exercise is bound to misinform students, parents and teachers about how English spelling really works, and also to set kids and parents off on the wrong path when it comes to how to phonetically decode words [Use the pragmatics!!!]
Learning to read English is about the pragmatics of matching what was probably meant to the potential phonetic word given the orthography. There is no 'pronunciation' for a nonsense word in English, because we don't know the specific way in which this orthographic word was meant to achieve its archetypically English eccentric spelling-sound correspondence. And there is no genuine target word in context to orientate your guess towards.
Philip Taylor said,
May 21, 2024 @ 2:24 pm
I wonder, Araucaria, whether your insightful analysis serves to support my hypothesis that being taught to read by my parents using purely the "look-and-say" method well before starting school was the primary reason that reading never seemed to pose me a real problem, unlike some of my peers. I became aware of the "phonics" method in later life, and was never able to identify the reason for its popularity. Yes, if we had a language in which there was a 1:1 mapping from letter or letter-cluster to sound, then phonics would have real and obvious benefits, but for a language as irregular and inconsistent as British English, it seemed (and still seems) entirely the wrong approach.
Araucaria said,
May 21, 2024 @ 4:24 pm
@Philip_Taylor I'm not sure. What I am more confident about, given much of the recent literature about children acquiring literacy, is that 'shared attention' and 'joint attention' is extremely significant and effective in helping children acquire linguistic competence. If my understanding of any of that is correct, then your parents reading and interacting with you way before school will definitely have had a very positive impact on your becoming an accomplished reader. [Although, most of my vague understanding about that is second-hand from other linguists]