David R. Olson

Literacy and Orality

Preface Introduction David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance Part I. Oral And Literate Aspects Of Culture And Cognition: 1. The oral-literature equation: a formula for the modern mind Eric Havelock 2. A plea for research on lay literary Ivan Illich 3. Oral metalanguage Carol Fleisher Feldman 4. Rational thought in oral culture and literate decontextualization J. Peter Denny 5. Cree literacy in the syllabic script Jo Anne Bennett and John W. Berry 6. Literacy: an instrument of Oppression D. P. Pattanayak Part II. Oral And Literate Forms Of Discourse: 7. Lie it as it plays: Chaucer becomes an author Barry Sanders 8. The invention of self: autobiography and its forms Jerome Bruner and Susan Weisser 9. Literacy and objectivity: the rise of modern science David R. Olson 10. Thinking through literacies Jeffrey Kittay Part III. Oral And Literate Aspects Of Cognition: 11. Literacy: its characterization and implications R. Narasimhan 12. The separation of words and the physiology of reading Paul Saenger 13. Linguists, literacy, and the intersionality of Marshall McLuhans Western man Robert J. Scholes and Brenda J. Willis 14. A neurological point of view on social alexia Andre Roch Lecours and Maria Alice Parente 15. Literacy as metalinguistic activity David R. Olson Author index Subject index.

On the comprehension of active and passive sentences

Abstract In a series of five experiments the ease of processing active and passive sentences was shown to be a function of the prior coding of a perceptual event. When the event was coded in terms of the actor, active sentences were more easily verified, when the event was coded in terms of the receiver of the action, passive sentences were more easily verified. This same pattern was shown to hold for answering active and passive questions. From this it was inferred that a passive sentence can be comprehended directly in the logical object-verb-logical subject word order without recovering its active sentence equivalent base structure. A processing model for the verification of active and passive sentences was proposed in terms of a series of binary comparison operations each of which requires additional time; this model was shown to account for about 90% of the variance in the time Ss required to verify these sentences.

The Triumph of Hope Over Experience in the Search for “What Works”: A Response to Slavin

Slavin’s call for evidence-based research on the effectiveness of treatments is criticized for its unreflective concept of a “treatment.” It is argued that treatments cannot be defined objectively but only relative to the beliefs, goals, and intentions of those supposedly affected by the treatments. An alternative approach to the study of schooling in terms of the entitlements and obligations of those involved at all levels of the system is suggested.

Talking about text:: How literacy contributes to thought

Abstract Recent examination of the effects of the role of literacy on cognition suggests that these effects cannot be tied exclusively to the acquisition of reading and writing skills. This paper advances the argument that literacy has its impact on cognition indirectly, through the invention and acquisition of a complex set of concepts, expressed in a metalanguage, for talking about texts. These devices turn linguistically-expressed propositions into objects of thought. An empirical examination of childrens knowledge of these specialized devices for referring to talk and thought indicates that they are acquired in the later school years. The sources, development, and implications of this specialized vocabulary are discussed. It is concluded that talk about text may be as important as the skills of reading and writing, in developing those skills usually identified as ‘literate’.

The ABCs of Deception: Do Young Children Understand Deception in the Same Way as Adults?.

Most research suggests that it is not until age 4 that children understand deception as a means of creating a false belief. Yet children could have failed on these tasks because of either (a) conceptual problems (an inability to understand that deception is a means of creating a false belief), or (b) pragmatic problems (an inability to articulate an understanding of false belief) and task complexity (an inability to follow the narrative or make appropriate inferences). Three experiments were conducted to determine why children might fail deception tasks, and results indicates that (a) children were no better at understanding deception whether they were active deceivers or observers of a deceptive act, and (b) childrens difficulty appeared to be associated with a conceptual deficiency (e.g., they could leave clues that would lead another to a possible belief but not a false belief)

Memory and inference in the comprehension of oral and written discourse

Three different inference types are considered in this paper: Propositional inferences which are necessary by virtue of the structure of the statements; Enabling inferences which are necessary by virtue of the structure of the discourse as a whole; and Pragmatic inferences which are invited by the content of the statements. In the first study, children from grades 4 and 6 were found to be able to differentiate between Pragmatic and Propositional inferences. In the second study, grade 5 children were found to differentiate Proposition and Enabling inferences from Pragmatic inferences. This ability to differentiate necessary from invited inferences was found to develop with age and ability. The children derived the inferences from either oral or written statements and narratives. Listening as opposed to reading was found to affect inference production. Readers were better able to verify statements referring to incidental story details. Listeners were better able to verify statements referring to the gist or...

The Cognitive Consequences of Literacy

The cognitive consequences of literacy derive not only from the well known properties of writing, its fixity and its permanence, but more fundamentally from the metalinguistic or metarepresentational properties it inherits from direct and indirect quotation. Literacy sponsors attention to the linguistic form of an utterance — its phonology, its lexicon, its sentences and above all its sentence meaning — the meaning conveyed when expressions are “mentioned” rather than “used.” A variety of cross-cultural and developmental evidence is used to assess this view and to show why schooling is such an important part of literacy.

Chinese children's understanding of false beliefs: the role of language

The present study investigated the universality of the early development of young childrens understanding and representation of false beliefs, and specifically, the effect of language on Chinese-speaking childrens performance in false belief tasks under three between-subjects conditions. The three conditions differed only in the belief verb that was used in probe questions regarding ones own or another persons beliefs namely the Chinese verbs, xiang, yiwei, and dang. While the three words are all appropriate to false beliefs, they have different connotations regarding the likelihood of a belief being false, with xiang being more neutral than either yiwei or dang. Experiment 1 involved thirty-five Chinese-speaking adults who responded to false belief tasks to be used in Experiment 2 in order both to establish an adult comparison and to obtain empirical evidence regarding how Chinese-speaking adults use the three belief verbs to describe different false belief situations. In Experiment 2, 188 three-, four-, and five-year-old Chinese-speaking children participated in three false belief tasks. They were asked to report about an individuals false belief when either xiang, yiwei, or dang was used in the probe question. Results revealed a rapid developmental pattern in Chinese-speaking childrens understanding of false belief, which is similar to that found with Western children. In addition, children performed significantly better when yiwei and dang, which connote that the belief referred to may be false, were used in belief questions than when xiang, the more neutral verb, was used. This finding suggests an important role of language in assessing childrens understanding of belief and false belief.

The Elaboration of the Noun Phrase in Children's Description of Objects.

Abstract In an attempt to study the structure and elaboration of the noun phrase of a descriptive sentence, two experiments were conducted in which children aged 4 to 7 years were required to describe an object relative to increasingly large sets of alternatives. It was found that even 4 year olds do not give an invariant “label” or noun phrase designation of an object but rather represent that object in terms of the context of alternative objects. Older children describe an object in terms of a larger set of alternatives than do younger children. Secondly, adjectives were found to be ordered in terms of their informational value, when this resulted in violation of adjective ordering rules, older children preserved these rules within a noun phrase by the use of conjunctions. Finally, older children were found to give longer and hence more informative descriptions than younger children, but only when more than three adjectives were required for the description.

The Cognitive Revolution in Children's Understanding of Mind.

Bruner, in reassessing the cognitive revolution, argues for the centrality of ‘meaning-making’ in human activity, claiming that children learn to give meaning to what people do as they learn the langu