From ‘cracking the orthographic code’ to ‘playing with language’: Toward a usage-based foundation of the reading process

• Main Author: Sebastian eWallot
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-08-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: meaning; language use; Natural Reading; reading research; language games
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00891/full

The empirical study of reading dates back more than 125 years. But despite this long tradition, the scientific understanding of reading has made rather heterogeneous progress: Many factors that influence the process of text reading have been uncovered, but theoretical explanations remain fragmented; no general theory pulls together the diverse findings. A handful of scholars have noted that properties thought to be at the core of the reading process do not actually generalize across different languages or form situations single-word reading to connected text reading. Such observations cast doubt on many of the traditional conceptions about reading. In this article, I suggest that the observed heterogeneity in the research is due to misguided conceptions about the reading process. Particularly problematic are the unrefined notions about meaning which undergird many reading theories: Most psychological theories of reading implicitly assume a kind of elemental token semantics, where words serve as stable units of meaning in a text. This conception of meaning creates major conceptual problems. As an alternative, I argue that reading shoud be rather understood as a form of language use, which circumvents many of the conceptual problems and connects reading to a wider range of linguistic communication. Finally, drawing from Wittgenstein, the concept of ‘language games’ is outlined as an approach to language use that can be operationalized scientifically to provide a new foundation for reading research.