NOVEMBEB 17, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



669 



gest to him but a very slight part and pos- 

 sibly not any, of the subtle meaning which 

 it has come to possess through a long process 

 of development. The writer, to try out this 

 principle, has conducted some experi- 

 ments upon school children, with a view 

 to discovering whether individuals could 

 correctly pronounce words they did not 

 understand in any adequate or precise 

 manner. The method of teaching reading 

 in the schools in which the experiments 

 were made leads pupils to endeavor to at- 

 tach some meaning to all new words in 

 their lessons; but even so, there was not a 

 pupil tested beyond the third grade who 

 could not readily pronounce words which 

 were utterly unintelligible to him, these 

 words being chosen from the works of 

 Shakespeare, Spencer, Emerson and 

 Roosevelt. Practically all these pupils 

 could easily pronounce the words in com- 

 plete passages which meant nothing to 

 them. Again, I tried these pupils in read- 

 ing problems in arithmetic and theorems 

 in geometry ; and most of them could with- 

 out hesitation pronounce the words iu 

 problems they could not interpret. Other 

 tests, some of them with university stu- 

 dents reading a foreign language, simply 

 impressed the principle that the oral rend- 

 ering of words and sentences is one thing, 

 while the correct appreciation of them in 

 all their significations is an altogether dif- 

 ferent thing. 



It will be readily granted that the least 

 important part of the process in reading is 

 simple recognition of words as mere verbal 

 forms, either visual or auditory. Most of 

 what is vital in learning to read, and 

 which is a test of the degree of mental de- 

 velopment one has reached, hsis reference 

 to the gaining of the meaning which words 

 and phrases have gradually come to de- 

 note. He who can not bring these mean- 

 ing's before consciousness when he looks 



upon words, even though he can pronounce 

 them, has not learned to read in a true 

 sense, as this term should be understood. 

 He has simply gained a certain degree of 

 familiarity with a peculiar kind of visual 

 object — an extremely simple, mechanical 

 sort of thing, requiring no very high de- 

 gree of mentality to master. 



Perhaps a special phase of the general 

 matter before us should be impressed at 

 this point. A child, or even an adult, may 

 be able to recognize isolated words, so that 

 he can pronounce them, and an onlooker 

 may say that he can read them. But read- 

 ing for the gaining of content does not con- 

 sist so much in dealing with isolated words, 

 as in grasping, as a whole, the phrase, the 

 clause or the sentence. Any good reader 

 is largely unconscious of particular words 

 in his reading. These fuse into larger 

 unities, which alone convey real meaning. 

 But a child may be taught to recognize 

 and vocalize detached words, while at the 

 same time he may be utterly unable to com- 

 bine these into patterns in the way in which 

 they must be actually utilized in gaining or 

 expressing thought. One often comes across 

 children who can call off the individual 

 words in a sentence, but they may be 

 utterly at sea when asked to give the 

 meaning of this sentence. They fail to 

 grasp it as a unity, and so it has little, if 

 any, meaning for them. 



It is a simple matter of psychology that 

 reading for content, instead of simply for 

 verbal recognition, can not go beyond the 

 individual's experience with the meaning 

 which is denoted. No one would be quite so 

 foolish as to claim that a child of two who 

 had had no experience outside of his nur- 

 sery could read understandingly the Old 

 Testament, for instance, or Tennyson's 

 "In Memoriam," or Milton's "Paradise 

 Lost." It is possible he might be taught 

 to pronounce the words; but reading for 



