The Psychology of Reading with Regard to the Orthographic Structure

The author refers to the development of the Czech and Slovak language from the satemic dialect of the Indo-European language and its prehistory in order to show how from the original non-articulated basis it arrived at articulation and a small number of word-stems and, by further differentiation of the present-day complexity of sounds. The spoken word is not an inorganic collection of separate sounds, but is the expression of an idea as a whole. The development of script, which the author outlines, proceeded from the pictographic stage (from pictorial symbols) to the syllabic and finally to the phonological stage. The written and the printed word, too, is the expression of an idea, it is a visual whole, more easily distinguishable than the auditive word. The graphic representation of the word has a long history with each nation. The orthography cannot give a phonological transcription, which would be extremely complicated, but it only typifies very roughly separate sounds after centuries of individual trials orthography became a social institution with a specific structure in each nation. Its basic sense is the creation of graphic structures, always absolutely identical, so as to facilitate the process of reading. Each written and printed word is a unique configuration having its own physiognomy, as already demonstrated by Emil Javal The configuration is formed in the Latin alphabet especially by the length of the word and by the prominent letters protruding above and below the central part of the script, by the upper and the lower dominants. Thus we do not read separate letters of the alphabet, but the aggregate configurations of words. The basis of both orthography and reading is visual, designed for sight, not for hearing. Elementary reading is basically identical with that of adults. Psychologically accounted for teaching is to lead the children to a general understanding of the meaning of the word, not to start by teaching separate letters of the alphabet on the basis of an auditive decomposition of words. The method called ≫analytico- synthetic≪, having a 180-year-old history, is wrong from the viewpoint of experimental psychology.