I will insist on this in this talk because when the child learns to read and
write, he will have to develop billions of new connections in
the brain which are not there before the child learns to read and write.
Now let's turn to the model of acquisition of reading development,
which I'm going to rely on the model of Uta Frith, which was developed some time ago,
but it's still used in most of the research devoted to reading
development in children.
It is a model in three stages: the LOGOGRAPHIC stage,
the ALPHABETIC stage, and the ORTHOGRAPHIC stage,
which I'm going to describe in turn.
The logographic stage is the stage where
the child is going to recognize some words
but as logos, as pictures,
because of the silent visual traits of these logos.
This is often a moment where the parents are very happy because
suppose the parent is driving with a child and the child said,
'mommy daddy, there is a stop sign there so you need to stop'.
And the parent thinks, 'Oh wow, my child can read.
This is tremendous'.
Actually, the child doesn't really read.
If you look at the logos here, say, take Coca-Cola,
if you write Caco-Calo instead of Coca-Cola,
the child will not perceive the difference.
At this stage the child doesn't make any relationship between letters and
sounds, because he still doesn't know the letters and
the correspondences between the letters and sounds;
he's only guessing, he's only recognizing
the word because of the silent visual features.