digitaldrz's blog

I am a retired professor of NeuroPsychology who developed a research program on the relationship between the brain and learning disability. I want to outline one particular study and show its importance in how we diagnose and teach the children we now label learning disabled.

An identified group of poor readers who had clear phonological deficits in reading were compared to average readers on two simple tasks. A group of words preselected to be in the sight vocabulary of all participants were paired under two conditions. In one case the student had to say whether the words meant the same, opposite, or unrelated. In the second task the students had to say whether the two words rhymed.

I taught neuropsychological research with an emphasis on special education for 25 years. I got started in this area when I told a friend that I did not have visual imagery. Her reaction was, "How do you think?"
I think by talking to myself but she thought via mental imagery. From there I developed a theory of the causes and remediation of reading disability.

To get started, try a simple experiment. Image an animal. Now rate it from 0-10 in terms of vividness and being lifelike. Did you image with your eyes open or closed? Now image with your eyes closed if they were open or open if they were closed. Now rate the image. Did it change?

It is 1980 and the web was not invented, but the Bulletin Board System (BBS) flourished. They served the same function of a website, email, file transfer, graphic  all in text. Most were served by a single phone line and there was no communication among the BBS.

************************
Nostalgic Asides
I remember the Sister BBS in Staten Island, NY had to close down because of a hacker.
I found a 300 baud modem a little slow and felt the need to upgrade soon. Ancient history.

The basic strategy of a phonics approach assumes that if you sound out the word and can hear it you will know what it means.  For the most part it is an effective strategy and one that worked for me.  On the other hand, those for whom it does not work, we simply call reading disabled.

The purpose of reading is to get meaning from the printed word.  A phonetic approach requires you to look at the word and auditorize it (at least mentally) and when you  hear the word, you will know what it means.  This assumes that English is inherently phonetic and the reader knows the word to begin with.  But let us accept the phonetic premise.