The Structure and Acquisition of Reading II : The Reading Process and the Acquisition of the Alphabetic Principle

Human linguistic communication undoubtedly was originally by ear and by mouth, but men began to communicate with each other also by eye and by hand at least 20 millenia ago. The visual route of communication apparently developed on its own hook for some time, as men drew pictures representing their ideas, on rocks and walls of caves. This protowriting was based on man's natural ability to interpret the visual world meaningfully; it probably involved little or no reliance on concepts from the spoken language. Users of this kind of visual communication were perforce limited by artistic talent and ingenuity in representing all possible notions. Probably in consequence of this inherent limitation, "idea writing" eventually gave way to the representation of words of the spoken language itself; here an infinity of notions could be represented with finite means. But still, the number and variety of words, while finite, is very large, and it is not a trivial matter to think up and memorize a picture for each item. Eventually, writing systems that represented the sounds of speech were invented and came into wide use. Since all utterances can be represented in terms of relatively few speech-sound units, it now became easier to render by eye all those meanings originally conveyed by ear. The usual units of speech transcribed were syllables (as in the Mesopotamian cuneiform scripts). Only very recently, during the first millenium B.C., was the alphabet (a transcription of abstract phonemes) invented. The clear trend in this history, then, has been away from