Keith Stanovich

Transcription

(Dr. Stanovich) And so Merton had this article in nineteen sixty eight in which he'd he'd use the term Matthew Effect to describe scientific careers. Herb walberg talked about Matthew Effects with respect to achievement in general. Okay uh… And including educational achievement um uh but but also other occupational endeavors. uh And then I stole the term third-hand, I guess, from Walberg and used it specifically as a term to model effects that are going on uh in the reading process itself to embed the idea of cumulative advantage and disadvantage effects in a developmental model of reading. You have uh well-developed phonemic representations, uh you struggle less with the code, uh and uh your phonological decoding is good, so you recognize words well very early in your reading experience. If you recognize words very well you have a lot of capacity left over for the high-level comprehension processes we were just just talking about. If you have a lot of capacity for those, stories are interesting. (laughs) Because you're thinking about them. And the stories are interesting, so you read more. And you read more and you develop more of those decoding processes And uh… And then interestingly what developed in the Matthew effects paper is even when when of let's say you … you get to further stages of reading where decoding processes are assymptoting and and other types of high level inferential processes are coming online, you have a built-in advantage there because all this reading you've been doing has been building declarative knowledge, it's been building lexical distinctions, it's been building vocabulary. All the things that you're going to need, let’s say post 4th grade as well. (Boulton) This is a particularly important spot. I mean, you just went from Matthew Effect into what reading does for the mind as far as reading as a cognitive exercise environment for making the kind of distinctions and critical reflection and Extension, into vocabulary differentiation, and into the world that we just don’t do if we don’t read. (Dr. Stanovich) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean you I titled the paper, you know, “Does Reading Make You Smarter?” uh… precisely to provoke people to think about this. The conclusion of of the paper was: The answer is Yes. If you default to what is pretty much a consensus view uh of intelligence. Certainly there are there are two really separable domains of intelligence: So-called fluid intelligence, abstract problem-solving, and the so-called crystallized intelligence, okay declarative knowledge, vocabulary, lexical distinctions were verbal facilities. Now since the Matthew Effect paper since some of the work that our group has done, but many other groups, on the effects of reading, the effects of exposure to print, crystallized intelligence is just massively built by uh reading itself. Independent of education. Independent of fluid intelligence. Regardless of what your levels of abstract problem solving are, you build declarative knowledge you build lexical distinctions with reading. And reading is uniquely efficacious. Some some work I always point to when I talk with teachers on this is by a psycholinguist by the name of Dawn Hayes and I think she mentioned this to you. uh Where he’s looked at what he calls the lexical density okay of text of various types. And in particular the distinction between oral language and and written language. So if you if you take a transcript off a network television show, or transcripts from let’s say a hospital waiting room conversation, or or whatever, you can compute indices of lexical rarity in there. They’re quite interesting statistical uh indices of let's say the relative rarity of a word in ten thousand words or in a thousand words how many words will you encounter that are outside let's say the basic five thousand-word lexicon. And if vocabulary is going to grow after the fourth grade then necessarily you have to be exposed to such words. Well, how often is that going to happen in text of various types? (Boulton) What are different venues that children or adults may find themselves in in which words that are uncommon to their common oral language are going to occur enough for them to have any exposure and learn them. (Dr. Stanovich) That's exactly it. Well and and what Hayes has shown is that the factor is just enormous. It's it's five to one, ten to one, twenty to one that a written source is going to give you more of just those exposures. And so there's every reason to believe that print is is uniquely efficacious on the side of crystallized intelligence. So if crystallized knowledge is is part of your concept of intelligence, and it is for ninety percent of the theorists out there, then in fact reading does make you smarter.