Dartmouth Events

Previous research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that fluent reading (of visual print) relies heavily on the unconscious visual recognition of units larger than single letters and smaller than whole words. Sighted readers automatically chunk groups of letters into complex graphemes as a by-product of gestalt principles of visual organization; and sighted readers quickly and unconsciously parse whole words into their component morphemes, independent of word meaning, based largely on the parallel processing of letters that the visual system enables. However, until recently (Fischer-Baum and Englebretson, 2016) the role of sublexical structure in facilitating braille reading, which relies exclusively on the tactile rather than the visual modality, has not been investigated. This talk summarizes our ongoing work in this area. Our experimental evidence demonstrates that adult readers of English braille do indeed access sublexical structure—namely the processing of digraphs as single orthographic units and the recognition of morphemes within morphologically-complex words. I will also briefly present some preliminary findings of a study of braille writing errors that likewise bear on this issue. This talk reviews our findings, discusses their consequences for our understanding of braille as a writing system, and suggests potential consequences for braille pedagogy and development.

Robert Englebretson is chair of the Linguistics Department at Rice University, where he teaches courses in morphosyntax, discourse, and grammar in social interaction. His earlier research interests focused primarily on how language use motivates and constrains language form; stance and identity; discourse and grammar; and  interactional linguistics. He has done fieldwork in Indonesia, and has authored a book and several articles on Colloquial Indonesian grammar.

Although Englebretson is a life-long braille reader, his interest in braille as a research topic only began to emerge in 2006 when he was appointed to serve as the US representative to the International Council on English Braille Committee on Linguistics and Foreign Languages. Under the auspices of that organization, he revised and published a braille version of the IPA, to empower better access to phonetics for blind and visually-impaired people working in language-related fields. Since 2012, he has co-chaired the Research Committee of the Braille Authority of North America. His braille-related research agenda focuses on the low-level perceptual and cognitive aspects of braille reading, especially sublexical structure. Englebretson seeks to bring braille research squarely into the mainstream of the reading sciences, and to contribute to evidence-based approaches to improving braille literacy.

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Sponsored by the Program in Linguistics