• DOI:10.1007/BF02653717
• Corpus ID: 143275563

Learning to read: an unnatural act

@article{Gough1980LearningTR,
  title={Learning to read: an unnatural act},
  author={Philip B. Gough and Michael L. Hillinger},
  journal={Bulletin of the Orton Society},
  year={1980},
  volume={30},
  pages={179-196}
}

• P. Gough, M. Hillinger
• Published 1980
• Linguistics, Education
• Bulletin of the Orton Society

The six-year-old's sight is as good as the adult's (Amigo 1972), and his hearing is nearly so (Elliott and Katz 1980). The child has an excellent memory (Mandler, in press), and his learning ability is remarkable. Even a conservative estimate of the size of his vocabulary will show that he must have learned, on average, more than four new words every day since his first birthday (Carey 1978). He has already learned to speak and understand his native language with remarkable fluency. The average American six-year-old can already produce and recognize more than a dozen vowels and nearly 30 consonants of English. He can produce and understand literally thousands of different words, and he can comprehend virtually any sentence that one can form with those words. To be sure, his language acquisition is not complete. Over the next decade he may have to smoothe out some rough spots in his phonology (Templin 1953), his vocabulary will grow by many more thousands of words (Oldfield 1963), and he must capture a few syntactic niceties which still escape him (Chomsky 1969). But his mastery of English would be the envy of any college graduate learning English as a second language. Yet for all his cognitive and linguistic talents, the child has one peculiar linguistic shortcoming: he cannot read a word. Indeed, that is one of the primary reasons why we now send him to elementary school. His teacher