As one of the world’s leading experts on literacy and spelling development, Rebecca A. Treiman has spent more than two decades finding order in the perceived chaos of the English language.
“The English writing system is often considered to be chaotic and hard to learn,” said Treiman, Ph.D., the Burke & Elizabeth High Baker Professor in Child Developmental Psychology in Arts & Sciences. “Some believe the only way to learn it is to memorize.
“However, our studies suggest that learning to spell in an alphabetic writing system is very much a linguistic process. Memorization plays some role — for example in learning about the ‘s’ of ‘island’ — but there is much more to spelling than rote memory. From an early age, children appreciate that spellings are maps of words’ linguistic structures and they create spellings that reflect their knowledge of linguistic form.”
A specialist in an area of science known as developmental psycholinguistics, Treiman’s research draws on the tools of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, social science, education and other fields to unravel the complex mysteries of human language acquisition.
Like the languages she studies, Treiman’s research interests span the globe. Her research has explored the effects of dialect on the spelling skills of American and British children, examined how Chinese kindergartners learn to read English in Hong Kong, and compared U.S. and Brazilian pre-schoolers to uncover differences in how children approach spelling in the English and Portuguese languages.
Closer to home, she is studying differences in spelling among whites and speakers of African-American vernacular English, publishing important work on the linguistic bases of spelling errors in children with dyslexia, and working with St. Louis schools for the deaf to determine if early cochlear implants also improve spelling skills.
Her studies of American youngsters have shown that even a child’s own name can influence certain spelling errors — for instance, a child whose name begins with A, such as Adam, is more likely to mistakenly insert a capital “A” in the middle of a word, such as “bAd.”
Treiman’s research is consistently supported through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institutes of Child and Human Development, the National Science Foundation and the March of Dimes Birth Defects Research Foundation. She also serves on research review panels at the NIH and the National Institute of Mental Health.
“In addition to being a remarkably prolific scientist publishing over a hundred articles and chapters, including many landmark publications, Becky has been a major leader in the field in many other ways,” said David Balota, Ph.D., professor of psychology and director of Linguistic Studies. “Becky has been on the editorial board of eight different journals, and was the chief editor for four years at the Journal of Memory and Language, a premier outlet for work in psycholinguistics and memory.”
A member of the faculty here since 2002, Treiman’s interest in language began early. As the daughter of a celebrated Princeton University particle physicist, Sam Treiman, she grew up in a home that was often the center of campus social gatherings. Her father’s colleagues included Albert Einstein and John Nash, the Nobel Laureate mathematician depicted in A Beautiful Mind.
One of three children (all of whom would eventually earn Ph.D.s), Treiman began studying French in the third grade. During long family sabbaticals to England, she gained first-hand exposure to peculiarities of the Queen’s English.
She returned to earn a bachelor’s degree in linguistics at Yale University, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She began teaching in 1980 as an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University, moving in 1984 to Wayne State University, where she was named the Gershenson Distinguished Faculty Fellow. She has been a visiting scholar at a research institution in Cambridge, England, and at the University of Queensland, Australia.
Treiman is founding director of the psychology department’s Reading and Language Lab. There, she and colleagues, such as research scientist Brett Kessler, Ph.D., are shedding new light on old languages.
In a perfect world, the best writing system for a language would be an alphabet that always spells a particular sound in only one way. Any person who knew this one-to-one mapping system of sound-letter correspondences could do a credible job of spelling out dictated words or pronouncing written text.
English, however — with words like “tough,” “though,” “through” and “bough” — has earned a reputation as hopelessly irregular and difficult.
Treiman admits the English writing system is far from ideal, and she understands the challenges it poses for children. However, she argues that educators are often too quick to tell students that an irregularly spelled word is an exception to the rule and therefore, must be memorized.
“Right now, teachers have a system that doesn’t make sense to them, so they give kids 10 words to memorize,” Treiman said.
An ongoing theme of Treiman’s research is that English spellings are actually fairly consistent and predictable as long as various rules and patterns are recognized.
She and her lab colleagues have found, for instance, that a word is often spelled with an “ea” when the short “e” sound is followed by “d” (“head,” for example). But when the final sound is “m,” the “ea” spelling is never used.
Her studies show that environmental clues play an important role in helping students recognize that certain vowel sounds are spelled in certain ways when they come before or after certain consonants. For example, the long “eye” sound is usually spelled “igh” in words that end in “t” (night, right, light).
While these spelling patterns might seem complex and difficult to apply, Treiman’s research confirms that many of these patterns are naturally apparent to adult spellers. For instance, English spellers expect double consonants at the end of a word (class, bell), but most would be startled to see them at the beginning (cclass, bbell), a pattern rarely seen in English.
“These patterns are not 100 percent accurate, but they could aid in spelling and reading,” Treiman said. “By getting a better idea of spelling patterns, English would not seem so chaotic. This is something that could be taught.”
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Rebecca A. Treiman Family: Husband, Charles McGibbon, a mountain climber and retired mathematics professor; two teen sons, Joe and Bob Hobbies: Hiking, skiing and traveling Education: Yale University, B.A. in Linguistics, 1976; University of Pennsylvania, M.A. in 1977 and Ph.D. in 1980, both in psychology |
When it comes to spelling instruction, Treiman’s research supports the use of phonics-based teaching systems, as opposed to whole-word methods espoused by some literacy groups.
“There’s some consensus that phonics currently is not being taught in very interesting ways and that children find it boring, in part, because it’s being taught by worksheets,” Treiman said. “Just because it isn’t being taught well, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taught. I would argue that the basic concepts behind phonics are both interesting and important, and that it needs to be taught better.”
Although some advocate for a simplification of the English spelling system, Treiman contends that many irregularities in English have evolved for valid reasons — and many bring their own benefits to the system.
For instance, once the spelling of a word becomes popular, we tend to stick with that spelling, regardless of how pronunciation of the word changes over time or across dialects. This principle of “conservatism” helps keep English spellings consistent, no matter how a word is pronounced in England, Scotland, Ireland or America.
Similarly, words borrowed from non-English languages often retain spelling from their original language, a principle that provides readers with important clues as to origin and meaning.
“It is important to understand the nature of English spelling, and it is seriously misunderstood,” Treiman said. “English spelling is by no means irrational or pathological, but serves several goals other than that of a one-to-one phoneme-letter correspondence that critics have imposed on it.”
And, while no one expects these language wars to be resolved soon, Treiman is confident that the fields of psychology and linguistics will play an important role at the peace table.
“We’re seeing a growing interest in linguistics among our students,” she noted. “Not only from education, child development and foreign languages, but also from the Philosophy, Neuroscience and Psychology Program in Arts & Sciences and other disciplines that are now exploring and feeding into a widespread and growing interest in the cognitive sciences, from students, who, for various reasons, are interested in learning more about how the brain processes information.”