Lesson 1 Reading AS A Neuro - Psychological Process PDF

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READING AS A NEURO - PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS (Eye, Ear, Brain,Dominance, etc) Why is it reading is a Neuro – physiological process? You have never been asked this question, but using our common sense and my background in reading, I would say that reading involves seeing letters, words and paragraphs, hearing sounds of letters, words and syllables, understanding or comprehending what one reads (which involves a number of thinking skills). So the neuro is the nerve that would be the brainwork that is connected to the physiological act of hearing, seeing and speaking the words. The Neuro-physiological process 1. Eye process - An American psychologist William James in his book Principles of psychology (1890, pp.193-195), observing that some forms of micro movement always accompany thought, James wrote: “In attending to either an idea or a sensation belonging to a particular sensesphere, the movement is the adjustment of the sense-organ, felt as it occurs. I cannot think in visual terms, or example, without feeling a fluctuating play of pressures, convergences, divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs…when I try to remember or reflect, the movement in question. Feel like a sort of withdrawal from the outer world. As far as I can detect, these feelings are due to an actual rolling afterwards and upwards of the eyeballs.” Example; while walking, doing small things, you use your thought probably, It is also your eye movement that the eye movement might be related to internal representations. Let’s sight some example; ask one of your classmates to participate in class and answer this question, observe his eye movement. “Who were the five people you saw this morning? His eyes up and left: Non-dominant hemisphere visualization- i.e. remembered imagery. In reading it has only two movements; a.

Fast reading (fast eye movement)

-Involuntary (jump) eye movement), scanning, skimming, and browsing b.

Slow reading (slow eye movement)

- Smooth eye movement, a rapid irregular movement of the eye as it changes focus moving from one point to another. It is essential for becoming a successful reader. 2. Ear process - the hearing process begins when sound waves enter the auditory canal and strike the eardrum, a membrane about one half inch across. When is capable of handling over 73,000 vibrations per second. When sound hits the eardrum, it causes movement of the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. The vibrations of sound are magnified by about twenty times as they pass over the ossicles and enter into the small opening in the inner ear without this amplication, we would be deaf, since about 99.9% of sound would be reflected back out the ear. It would be like trying to talk someone who is under water. This is the ingenious job of these amazing bones in the middle ear. They have been designed to take sound energy from the ear, amplify it and transfer that energy into fluidfilled inner ear structures. When this take place, a small electrical signal is made and sent to a corresponding circuit in the auditory nerve that carries it instantly to the brain.

According to Thérien (1985), there are at least five distinct processes active every time we read a text: •

Neuro-physiological (eye movements, the brain’s functions, etc.);

•

Cognitive (the basic cognitive functions as studied by cognitive science);

• Argumentative/narrative (the act of following a complex sign such as a discourse, a narrative, etc); •

Affective (emotional response); and

• Symbolic (interpretation of the text within the context of our own body of knowledge and establishment of relations between the text being read and other texts). These five processes can be said to define three tasks: manipulation (the material dimension of the reading process), comprehension, and interpretation. In other words, to read a text is to be able to progress through it, which implies both manual and neurophysiological aspects. In a post-typographic era, we must consider how each of these tasks changes and how the interrelations between them change as well. What does it mean to manipulate an e-book? What new strategies must be developed now that the basic element of reading, the page, is not present? Can manipulation be transposed without any problems from one context (book culture) to another (screen culture or ebook culture)?

The second task, comprehension, implies the semiotic dimension of the reading process. To read a text is to understand what is written, which implies linguistic, cognitive and affective aspects. E-books and hypermedia help produce new forms of texts, requiring new strategies of comprehension. The third task, interpretation, refers to the symbolic dimension of the reading process. To read is to establish a relation between the text being read and other texts that explain, illustrate, complete, or expand what is being read. If interpretation is the minimal relation established between two texts by a reader, the second text facilitating understanding of the first, then a networked reading environment would presumably help bring about interpretation. And yet, this is not the case, as several early studies of readers working in hypertext environments demonstrated (e.g., Kim & Hirtle, 1995; Foss, 1989; Rouet & Levonen, 1996). The possible problem here is one of over-interpretation: when a reader makes connections that are not based on a complete or complex knowledge of the text being read, that connection may confound rather than facilitate interpretation. If the text is not "read"–if it has not been the object of an act of appropriation–then its interpretation may quite easily be uote non fondé” – that is, superficial, divergent instead of convergent (Eco, 1992). • The three tasks involved in reading–interpretation, comprehension, and manipulation are logically implied: interpretation logically implies comprehension, which logically implies manipulation. This recalls C. S. Peirce's notion of prescission: to have a 3, you need a 2, and to have a 2, you need a 1. 1 can stand by itself, but 2 needs, just to exist, a 1, and so on. This is to say that that we cannot have complex forms of interpretation if we do not have adequate forms of comprehension, which themselves require satisfactory forms of manipulation A model of reading One of the first and most significant, computational models is that created by Rumelhart and McClelland (1981). Theirs is an interactive activation model based on three levels of processing following from visual input; the feature level (which detects the individual features of letters), the letter level (which collates input from the feature level to detect letters), and finally, the word level (which takes the outputs of the letter level to detect words). As it stands, this is just a hierarchical model...