If you’re an expert reader, you read these words effortlessly. In fact, it’s so automatic that if you see a written word, it’s impossible not to read it.
This skill, acquired over years of hard work, is fortunately transferable to other languages: no need to relearn the whole process.
By looking at learning to read and its general mechanisms, we’ll gain a better understanding of how reading in a foreign language works.
Neural recycling
First of all, it’s important to situate the appearance of written language and reading in our history. Appearing some 6,000 years ago, it is a purely cultural phenomenon. In our basic “equipment”, no cerebral area is initially specialized in the processing of written language.
According to Stanislas Dehaene (1), learning to read is only possible thanks to neuronal recycling in a visual area at the junction between the occipital and temporal lobes, in the visual cortex.
Originally dedicated to the recognition of faces or geometric shapes, it is recycled in the visual recognition of written words when learning to read.
But while we can recognize that a cup is the same cup no matter which way the handle is turned, young readers have trouble recognizing certain letters, known as mirrors .
This is the case with /p/, /q/, /b/ and /d/, where the position of the elements elements (the bar and the loop) is decisive for their identification.
Two ways of access
Once we’re past the stage of recognizing and deciphering letters,there are two ways of accessing the meaning of words: the assembly path and the addressing path.
The assembly process involves phonology. We match each letter or group of letters to sounds that we assemble to find the meaning of the word we’re reading. This is the route used for terms we’re encountering for the first time, such as unfamiliar, rare or technical words, or unfamiliar family names. You can then watch yourself reading syllable by syllable, in a low voice or in your head.
The addressing channel is also called lexical and uses spelling. There’s no need to go through the process of deciphering letters→sounds, as we’re able to recognize the word image directly and assign it a meaning. This route is much faster, because it bypasses one stage.
This is the path we use as expert readers, when we read in our mother tongue or in a language we know well.
Psycholinguists call these two pathways independent , because they don’t cooperate. In fact, there may even be competition between them: the first one to provide access to meaning wins out.
Reading in a foreign language
In the light of the above, reading in a foreign language has a number of specific features:
– for remote languages (Cyrillic, Arabic, ideograms…), a character recognition stage is required. character recognition,
– we can understand all the words that resemble those we’ve learned in languages we already know, with the pitfalls of associating meanings that may not be the same (false friends) and mispronouncing them.
For absolute beginners, we recommend manipulating the words to be read orally.. AHaving access to the meaning of words through their sound makes it easier and quicker to decipher them on paper. It also makes it easier to avoid the reading pitfalls associated with languages that are not transparent (like French), i.e. where words are not always written as they are pronounced.
As in the mother tongue, the aim in a foreign language is to become familiar with reading to the point of being able to read using the addressing pathway, without going through the process of deciphering.
1-Stanislas Dehaene, The Neurons of Reading, Editions Odile Jacob, 2007.
