Carl Sagan observed that books allow humans to work magic through imagination. Steven Roger Fischer traces the history of reading from early symbols to electronic text. He explores how reading evolved from a rare skill in Mesopotamia, where only 120 out of 12,000 could read, to a personal experience involving sight and sound. Reading involves extracting meaning from symbols and combining hearing and vision in a synesthetic process. Early reading was task-oriented while modern reading involves comprehending continuous text.

1. HISTORY OF READING
“A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic,” Carl Sagan poignantly observed. And while the writerstoryteller puts in place the pieces necessary for that magic to manifest, ―the catalyst is the reader‘s imagination.‖ But
how, exactly, did we cultivate the skill of reading, which is so central to our intellectual identity? InA History of
Reading (public library), Steven Roger Fischer traces how we went from the dawn of symbols to electronic text, and in
the process deconstructs what it actually means to read.
He offers a poetic frame in the introduction:
What music is to the spirit, reading is to the mind. Reading challenges, empowers, bewitches, enriches. We perceive little black marks on white
paper or a PC screen and they move us to tears, open up our lives to new insights and understandings, inspire us, organize our existences and
connect us with all creation.
Surely there can be no greater wonder.
He then explores the yin-yang of reading and writing:
Though reading and writing go hand in hand, reading is actually writing‘s antithesis — indeed, even activating separate regions of the brain.
Writing is a skill, reading is a faculty. Writing was originally elaborated and thereafter deliberately adapted; reading has evolved in tandem with
humanity‘s deeper understanding of the written word‘s latent capabilities. Writing‘s history has followed series of borrowings and refinements,
reading‘s history has involved successive stages of social maturation. Writing is expression, reading impression. Writing is public, reading
personal. Writing is limited, reading open-ended. Writing freezes the moment. Reading is forever.
Reading has always been different from writing. Writing prioritizes sound, as the spoken word must be transformed or deconstructed into
representative sign(s). Reading, however, prioritizes meaning. The faculty of reading has, in fact, very little to do with the skill of writing.
What is reading, then? The answer is not simple, as the act of reading is variable, not absolute. In its most general modern definition, reading is of
course the ability to make sense of written or printed symbols. The reader ‗uses the symbols to guide the recovery of information from his or her
memory and subsequently uses this information to construct a plausible interpretation of the writer‘s message‘. But reading has not always been
this. Initially it was the simple faculty of extracting visual information from any encoded system and comprehending the respective meaning. Later
it came to signify almost exclusively the comprehending of a continuous text of written signs on an inscribed surface. More recently it has included
the extracting of encoded information from an electronic screen. And reading‘s definition will doubtless continue to expand in future for, as with
any faculty, it is also a measure of humanity‘s own advancement.
‗To read‘ was Sumerian šita (šit, šid, šed), meaning also ‗to count, calculate, consider, memorize, recite, read aloud‘. Very few in Mesopotamia
could ever achieve this faculty. Around 2000 BC at Ur, the region‘s greatest metropolis with a population of around 12,000, only a small
proportion — perhaps one out of a hundred, or about 120 people at most — could read and write. From 1850 to 1550 BC the Babylonian citystate of Sippar, with approximately 10,000 inhabitants, housed only 185 named ‗scribes‘ (that is, official tablet writers), ten of whom were in fact
women. It appears from this and similar statistics elsewhere that no more than at most a few score literates were alive in Mesopotamia‘s city-states
at any given time.
[…]
From this near-universal failure of Mesopotamian scribes to elaborate a more user-friendly literature, one can deduce that reading was
predominantly work. That is, it was not a solitary, agreeable, silent business* — but public, taxing and loud. The written word very often served
simply to prompt the retrieval of a text earlier learnt by heart. For all Mesopotamian literature, even written literature, was public and oral. Writing

2. was still a means to an end, the public performance, a tradition stretching back tens of thousands of years, and not yet an end in itself: the solitary
confrontation with the written word.
Tablets ‗spoke‘ for those whose seals were impressed on them. Judges in Babylon, for example, could speak of a tablet‘s contents as its ‗mouth‘,
could publicly assert they had ‗heart‘ the tablet (in a way very similar to how today‘s judges read affidavits). There was no contesting, no challenge
by witnesses in attendance; denying one‘s seal brought severe punishment. The written voice was the actual voice.
Reading is not merely the attaching of sound to grapheme, which occurs only at an elementary level. Meaning is involved, and in a fundamental
way. At a higher level of perception reading can even convey meaning alone, without any recourse to sound.
Therein lies reading‘s sense-like magic.
He goes on to explore the five phases of information exchange — production, transmission, reception, storage, and
repetition — pointing out that with writing, they occur either aurally or visually, but reading is a synesthetic process that
often combines the two sense of hearing and sight.
He then offers a brief history of how shapes became sounds:
Sign became sound — free from its system-external referent — in Mesopotamia between 6,000 and 5,7000 years ago. The idea soon spread, west
to the Nile and east to the Iranian Plateau and even to the Indus, where different languages and different social needs demanded other graphic
expressions. Everywhere, writing was recognized to be an invaluable tool for accumulating and storing information: it facilitated accounting,
material storage and transport, and it retained names, dates and places better than human memory ever could. All early ‗reading‘ involved very
simple code recognition, and was invariably task-oriented.
The great reading opportunity of electronic text is that digital content can be read by a machine. This machine readability
can be used to analyze text for syntactic structure, grammatical attributes, word difficulty, pronunciation attributes, and
the like, and the results of this analysis can then be used to give shape to the presentation of text, using patterns that enable
the eye and the mind to work together to build meaning for the reader. The LiveInk method of attribute extraction and
varied presentation of text can be automatically performed, and finally transforms Aristotle's sentence into this:
Spoken words
are the symbols
of mental experience,
and written words
are the symbols
of spoken words.
Which cognitive processes relate to reading?
by Silvia Mazabel Ortega MA, Dynaread Clinical Neuropsychology and Learning Disabilities.
Abstract
Adequate reading of words and texts is central for school-based learning and for occupational success. This article defines
the cognitive processes that have been related to reading development in English (1, 2). Having them as components of
general reading instruction as well as of remediation programs for reading disorders has proven effective.
Phonological processing
Phonological processing skills are based on the sounds of language and are the basis of decoding and word recognition.
Two main skills are included in phonological processing: a) phonics or the ability to associate sounds with letters, and
b) phonological awareness (PA) or the ability to manipulate sounds in speech. ―The ability to notice, think about and work
with the individual sounds in spoken words‖ (3, p. 377) is called phonemic awareness and is included within PA. These
skills allow the learner to translate letters (graphemes) into sounds (phonemes) while learning to read and decoding

3. unfamiliar words. When a word is read various times it becomes a sight-word (i.e., recognized instantly and without
analysis, for example the) which allows the reader to read faster.
Syntactic Awareness
Syntactic awareness refers to the ability to understand the grammar of the language within sentences. It is important
because it helps predict the words that will come next in the sequence.
Working memory
Working memory is defined as the ability to retain information (a word) for a short period of time while processing
incoming information (How is it written or pronounced?) and retrieving information from memory (What does it mean?
How does it relate to other words in the text?).
Morphological awareness
Morphological awareness refers to sensitivity to morphemes in words (minimal units of meaning within a word- prefixes,
suffixes and word roots-, for example dys in dyslexia) and the ability to manipulate them. It makes word pronunciation
predictable, provides consistency of spelling patterns, helps preserve the meaning relationship between words, eases the
load on working memory, and offers a meaning-related strategy to understand texts (4, 5).
Semantic processing
Semantic processing is related with vocabulary knowledge, understanding what a word means, and how to use words and
meanings in context. Orthographic processing refers to the knowledge of the writing conventions and spelling (What
spelling patterns are legal in English?). For example, in English there aren‘t words ending with ‗v‘.
Application
Learners who struggle at reading have important difficulties with phonological processing, working memory, syntactic
and morphological awareness, but semantic and orthographic processing are not often affected in this population (2, 6). If
a student is not able to decode a word, or to use the morphological structure of a word, she will not develop an accurate
sight word vocabulary and her reading fluency (ability to read connected text fast, smoothly, automatically and with good
intonation) will be affected. This will overload her working memory capacity and as a result will not be able to gain
meaning from a text. Research shows that children with reading disorders benefit from programs (like Dynaread) that
include these cognitive skills as components of their remediation.
References
1. Roman, A. A., Kirby, J. R., Parrila, R. K., Wade-Woolley, L., and Deacon, S. H. ―Toward a comprehensive view of the
skills involved in word reading in grades 4, 6, and 8‖ Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 102 (2009): 96113. Print.
2. Siegel, L. S. ―Basic cognitive processes and reading disabilities‖ Handbook of Learning Disabilities. Eds. H. L.
Swanson, K. R. Harris and S. Graham. NY: Guilford Press, 2003. 158-181. Print.
3. Lerner, J., and Kline, F. ―Learning disabilities and related disorders: Characteristics and teaching strategies
10th Edition”. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print
4. Deacon, S. H., Wade-Woolley, L., and Kirby, J. ―Crossover: The Role of Morphological Awareness in French
Immersion Children‘s Reading‖ Developmental Psychology. 43.3 (2007): 732–746. Print.
5. Siegel. L. S. ―Morphological awareness skills of English language learners and children with dyslexia‖ Topics in
language disorders.28.1 (2008): 15-27. Print.
6. Siegel, L. S., and Ryan, E. B. ―Development of sensitivity, phonological and short-term memory skills in normally
achieving and learning disabled children‖ Developmental Psychology. 24 (1988): 28-37.

4. Reading is a physiological process as your brain needs to react to what is onthe page. It is the thinking and alertness of the
brain that is used to process the words that are on a page or screen when you read. Whilst you are alert and thinking, the
brain is working at full capacity, but even at rest it is performing physiological functions to keep us alive and keep us
breathing. Our body is constantly performing physiological tasks, most of the time we are not aware of the reactions
within our body that our brain and nervous system are causing.
Reading also uses motor sensors to move your eyes across the page, this is all done by your brain making your optic
nerve move and work to read the words on the page. These are all physiological reactions to what is going on, therefore
making reading a physiological process. Most of the things that our bodies do, in particular the reactive things that our
bodies do are predominantly physiological. This is where our brain processes signals so that we can react to perform a
function. All of these communications are made through electrical impulses within our bodies. These electrical impulses
are transferred from the brain to different parts of the body through our nervous system. These communications happen so
quickly that we do not notice the signals being sent and received.
These signals are then received by the motor nerves that make us move. In the case of reading, the optic nerves in our eyes
that do the reading. This is then sent back to the brain through another series of signals through ournervous system so that
they can be processed and we can read.
Reading can be consider as communication process, because the token or the symbols( litters or numbers) is not write for
as we will have to read, but it was wrote to deliver or to share our opinionsor our emotions to whom who will read.
Because of this,the writer has a direct communication to reader through text he/she has been written.As we comprehend
what has been written, we can emphasize what authors aim. So, we will have our reaction. Therefore, the reader and the
writer has a communication to each other.That's why it called as a communication process.