9.6. Conclusions

9.1. Reading as perception of information

9.1.1. Vocalisation and verbose

Reading is an act of communication in which information is transferred from a transmitter to a receiver, whether the reader is a scholar deciphering a medieval text or a child identifying a single letter on a blackboard. The received information is correlated to the recipient's personal attitude towards it and is emotionally experienced by the recipient as discovering the meaning of the information being read.

There is a clear distinction between reading and vocalisation. Vocalisation is simple re-encoding graphic signs into their sound correlation (letters, letter combinations, words etc.). In other words, vocalisation is the process of transmitting a graphic code (visual information) in its sound form (acoustic information). Normally, vocalisation of a text is aimed at acoustic manifestation of grammatical relations of the word rows, the content and the meaning of what is being vocalised. Thus, vocalisation is included into a complex process of reading as its component.

If vocalisation is realised at the level of words, word combinations or sentences without correlation of sounds to the content and the meaning, then, instead of reading, the so-called verbose (verbalisation) takes place. That is the text is verbalised but not understood.

With a moderate degree of skill, an adult reader is able to read silently much faster than he can read aloud. No one would suggest that he gets less information from the page if he does not vocalise every word. It is true that there is a tendency to ‘sub-vocalise, i.e. to read every word ‘silently’ when a passage is difficult. However, one cannot conclude that sub-vocalisation or reading aloud is required to make a difficult passage easier. Even if every word is articulated, there is still the problem of working out what it means; the meaning of language is no more given directly in its sound than it is available in the surface structure of writing. The explanation for sub-vocalisation is more likely to be that reading a difficult passage automatically reduces reading speed, and we have a habit of articulating individual words when we read at a speed slow enough for individual words to be enunciated, especially when we happen to be loading our short-term memory with individual words rather than higher-order ‘meaning’.

9.1.2. Redundancy

9.1.2.1. Uncertainty and information

Reading is not a passive kind of language activity, as it may seem on the face of it. A reader has to pay his active contribution if he wants to acquire available information. A reader is an active seeker of information from his visual environment. The eye picks up information at the command of the brain. The brain, which possesses our prior knowledge of the world, contributes more information to reading than the visual symbols on the printed page.

All information acquisition in reading, from identification of individual letters or words to comprehension of entire passages, can be regarded as the reduction of uncertainty. Skilled reading utilises redundancy of information from a variety of sources so that, for example, knowledge of the world and of the language will reduce the need for visual information from the printed page. Information is the reduction of uncertainty. Uncertainty is considered as the number of alternatives between which the recipient has to choose. It is beside the point whether the receiver's decision to choose a particular alternative concerns the classification of objects or events, or the identification of an occurrence, or the selection among various possibilities. Information and uncertainty are defined in terms of the number of alternative decisions that could be made, no matter what the alternatives are.

Suppose that a child is given a task of identifying a letter written on the blackboard. There are 26 alternatives available to the receiver. They are 26 letters of the alphabet. The receiver’s uncertainty involves a decision or choice among 26 possibilities. Sometimes the exact number of alternatives cannot be known, for example, if a name or a word is being transmitted. But this indefinite amount of uncertainty is immediately reduced when the receiver learns that the name or word begins with a particular letter, or is of a particular length, either of which will reduce the number of alternative possibilities.

If we regard reading like any other process of acquiring information, namely the reduction of uncertainty, then we have discovered the way in which the areas of letter identification, word identification and ‘reading for comprehension’ can be considered in the same light. In each of the three aspects of reading, information is acquired visually to reduce the number of alternative possibilities.