Brubaker 1980

Brubaker, Daniel. 1980. "What does the eye perceive when reading? Words, letters, context, or what?" Notes on Literacy. Interest level: specialist.

Discusses how the eye works and quotes research by Marcel A. Just (1978), which states that eye fixations are sensitive to underlying semantic processes. Lists three types of memory:

• Very brief visual memory etched on the retina of the eye
• Short-term memory where knowledge is stored
• Long-term memory where patterns of letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and on up the hierarchy are ingrained after long exposure to them

Describes imagery as "one organized way of arranging the basic concepts so that they can be stored in one's long-term memory." Concludes with the importance of

• identifying context clues
• teaching at the level of words and phrases rather than letters or syllables, and
• helping new readers recognize grammatical clues so they may obtain meaning.

New readers should be taught to see patterns and to associate them with meaning. Repetition and practice help ingrain meaningful material into long-term memory.

• Bibliography module: Brubaker 1980
• In overview module: Bibliography (Literacy): B
• In modular book: Bibliography (Literacy), by Doris Gallemore, Trudi C. Hunt, Jeanne Swanson, and Stephen L. Walter
• In document collection: Reference materials
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 18 May 1999

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