koglist February 2002

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Fwd: Reading Without Writing: (Comments on Sperber: text-e.org)

by Gergely Csibra

Non-member submission from [Stevan Harnad <harnad(a)cogprints.soton.ac.uk>] --- Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2002 13:16:57 +0000 (GMT) From: Stevan Harnad <harnad(a)cogprints.soton.ac.uk> To: september98-forum(a)amsci-forum.amsci.org cc: neuromot <neuromotor-control(a)ai.mit.edu>, vision <Vision-List-Request(a)ADS.COM> Subject: Reading Without Writing: (Comments on Sperber: text-e.org) I append my own commentary, by way of provocation, below. You are encouraged to comment too, at: http://www.text-e.org ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 17:05:37 +0100 From: text-e(a)text-e.org Subject: New text on text-e A new text is online at http://www.text-e.org. Dan Sperber : "Reading without Writing". You are all invited to take part into the discussion. Gloria Origgi & Noga Arikha moderators of text-e -------------------------------------------------------------------- Writing Skill: Its Peripheral Motor and Central Cognitive Components Stevan Harnad Dan Sperber makes the very reasonable prediction that a good deal of our writing will eventually be done by dictation, once automatic speech-transcription becomes sufficiently reliable, but that we will continue to read. For whereas we speak much faster than we can write, we speak (and listen) much slower than we can read. Dan is also quite right that much of this is because we have evolved a brain that is specifically speaking/listening-prepared rather than reading/writing-prepared (although the fact that language originated in an organic adaptation for an oral/aural "culture" makes our latter-day reading alacrity a rather remarkable epiphenomenon!). But I am not so convinced by his predictions about the future of writing, and instruction in it. I of course don't mean calligraphy or typing skills. I mean the exercise of the act of creating lapidary written text, by whatever motor organ one may use, be it hand, foot or mouth. The essence of the skill of writing no more resides in the muscular adeptness of a motor endorgan than oratory skill resides in the adroitness of the lips. An early clue to this mismatch of cognitive skill levels comes here: Dan Sperber: "Is it that writing systems are more complex than languages? Quite the opposite.... [L]inguists have not yet succeeded in providing a fully explicit grammar of any language, whereas writing systems are based on fully explicit rules." But that is comparing apples and fruit! The right "system" to compare with the writing system for complexity is not "language," but speech. In other words, grapheme systems must be compared with phoneme systems. The two will be found to be of approximately the same level of complexity (although herein might lie some of the clues to the remarkable speed-advantage of the visuospatial [graphemic] mode over the audiotemporal [phonemic] mode for input [but not for output]). Yet it is LANGUAGE that both modes encode. And language is the system with which grammarians are still struggling, not writing or speech. So what has gone wrong? Dan notes that "Writers can write, correct, rewrite." Indeed. And what are they correcting? They are not correcting their penmanship or their typing skills. They are correcting their WRITING, and by writing skill I mean something similar to what we mean when we refer to a speaker's "oratory" skill (how well he expresses himself in words orally, in real time). Writing is not an online, real-time, do-or-die skill like oration. Let us not forget that until the very recent advent of audio recording, speech left no permanent residue (apart from the impressions in auditors' minds and memories: the oral tradition). Writing, in contrast, is an off-line, doing and redoing skill, in which the output undergoes a variety of dynamic transformations (each of them in principle preservable) before it is finally etched in stone. And writing's essence is that it does preserve a residue: a plastic, manipulable one. And that, entirely independent of the peripheral input/output sensorimotor modality, is the central essence of writing skill -- what it is that a writer must LEARN, through trial, error and feedback, rather than already KNOWING, ex officio, so to speak, by virtue of already knowing how to speak. I don't want to be too apodictic about this. Some writers are "naturals," writing lapidary texts literally "as they speak." But I believe such gifts are a rarity, even among gifted writers, whose skills lie as much in the editing and rewriting as in the spontaneous generation (dictation, if you like) of the first draft. What resources does Dan envision for the dictaphone version of this skill? Dan Sperber: "As soon as technology will make it possible to see one's speech properly transcribed as it unfolds, and to modify the transcription by means of oral instructions (and also, probably, of pointing and highlighting hand movements), writing will present no advantage that is sufficient to justify its cost." If we are agreed that using a computer, keyboard, screen and mouse to edit text -- to erase, write over, cut/paste, move, transpose, search/replace, compare, etc.) is indeed old-style writing (closer to calligraphy than oratory), then the real empirical question here concerns how useful people will find it to inject an oral/aural element into this interaction with their graphemes. Dan may be speculating here that there will be a more convenient way of cutting and pasting using oral commands rather than reaching out and grabbing text with a mouse. (The "highlighting hand movements" are equivocal, if they are merely shadowing what one does with a mouse!) Perhaps he is right. Or, equally possible, once the first draft has been generated by dictation, the rest of the writing will be more effective with mouse, keyboard and screen, or still-to-be-discovered sensorimotor peripherals, with the mouth reserved only for relatively long bursts of inserting new text. It is hard to second-guess this in advance, before the hybrid vocal/manual dictation/manipulation capability is actually implemented, and then tested for its usability and user-friendliness by "human factors" specialists. But what seems clear is that this new hybrid oral/manual skill will indeed be a new (peripheral) motor skill, one that users will have to master! and having mastered it, they will have to turn to mastering the higher level (central) cognitive skill that this technology was devised to serve. And that higher level skill will be WRITING, not SPEAKING. And both skills will probably have to be taught. Dan Sperber: "Once writing isn't practised anymore (except by calligraphists), what will happen to its teaching?... [An] economy of effort... would result from teaching children just to read [rather than] teaching both skills [reading and writing]." I can't quite see the economy. Calligraphy (penmanship) is certainly gone. Possibly (though not surely) keyboarding too. But the bimodal motor skill underlying this new, hybrid oral/manual manipulation of graphemes and lexemes? Will that not have to be taught and learnt too? And only then begins the instruction in the USE of these bimodal text-manipulating motor skills in the service of the real higher-order cognitive skill in question, namely, writing. Dan Sperber: "One may assume that the teaching of writing will long outlive its obsolescence." This often happens, out of habit and superstition, sometimes until an entire generation dies off. But is that what is at issue here? Will the counterparts of both the peripheral motor skill and the central cognitive one underlying writing -- the latter always overlapping with the cognitive skill of speech, but never coextensive with it -- not both continue to exist, as skills to be taught and mastered, rather than being supplanted, as Dan suggests, by the extant skills of reading and speaking? Let us not, by the way, underestimate the importance of the exercise of motor skills, both peripheral and central. What Held & Hein's (1963) experiments (with the active and passive kittens) showed us was that the passive "reading" of visual patterns is not even enough to allow us to learn how to see: Active, dynamic sensorimotor interactions between our bodies and the shapes and locations of objects in space -- trial-and-error, fumble-and-find practice in navigating, reaching, manipulating, using our muscles, guided by feedback from our mistakes -- are necessary, in order to develop normal vision. Now speaking is "virtual" writing, just as writing is virtual speech. So it is unlikely that we would become either aphasic or alexic, like the passive kittens, if all we were allowed to do was to speak, read, and dictate text. But without the further dynamic interaction with text that is involved in real writing, and editing, and re-writing, I doubt that we would ever generate some of the great prose stylists our species has produced so far. (I make no case for teaching, because I am not convinced that the higher-order skill of writing can be taught; it is learned, yes, from reading and speaking, but also from practice in writing and re-writing text, and not just dictating it -- at least by those of us not among the lucky few who can spontaneously "write as they speak" and "speak as they write.") Nor should we forget the homology with calculation, a skill of which the computer has relieved our brains -- to the great cost of the numeracy of a subsequent generation. (Dan's suggestion that speaking and reading skills are all you need for writing seems rather like suggesting that seeing and walking skills are all you need for dancing!) Dan Sperber: "It is all too easy to speak of a return to orality. The most profound effect that writing has had on human civilizations has been to allow them to become truly cumulative instead of evolving forever within the limits of human long-term memory. Far from reversing these effects, the new technologies allow new forms of cultural accumulation as well as new ways of mining the accumulated information." Agreed. But the question is: What will those new ways be? Dan thinks instantaneous speech transcripts (lexemes, really: one wonders about non-alphabetic languages) will be the "killer" application, with reading & dictating then replacing reading & writing. In contrast, I think "skywriting" (the rapid online manipulation of, and communication using, digital text) will become faster and faster and more and more powerful, no doubt accelerated by vocal input in place of keyboard input, but that the navigation and manipulation of the visuospatial graphemes is unlikely to be optimal by voice alone, nor even predominantly. The real revolution, in my view, lies in having accelerated the speed, scope, and interactiveness of writing (sic) to something closer to the speed of thought (whose tempo is of the same order as the speed of speech, for which our brains were specifically "co-prepared"), rather than in its replacement by transcribed speech (Harnad 1991, 1995, 2001). Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.h tml Harnad, S. (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of Electronic Quote/Commenting. In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.) Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp. 397-414. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.interactive.cog nition.html Harnad, S. (2001) Beyond Access and Impact: The Ultimate Benefit of Skyreading/writing. http://makeashorterlink.com/?D28851D5 http://www.text-e.org/debats/LeftFrame/printthreads.cfm?ConfText_ID=7&Parent =0&Top_ID=253&Intervention_ID=253 Held, R., & Hein, A. (1963). Movement produced stimulation in the development of visually guided behavior. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 56, 872-876 http://www.sscl.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/goodale/research/active.pdf

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koglist February 2002