Alphabetism in reading science

There has been mounting concern among social scientists that conclusions from studies conducted on highly educated populations from affluent European cultures may have limited applicability to human behavior in general (Henrich et al., 2010). Similar reservations have also been voiced in the fields of language (Evans and Levinson, 2009) and literacy (Share, 2008a; Frost, 2012). Reading research, in particular, has been overwhelmingly dominated by work on English, which appears to be an outlier among European alphabets (Seymour et al., 2003; Share, 2008a). I have argued that because spelling–sound relations are so complex in English orthography, much of reading research has been confined to a narrow Anglocentric research agenda addressing theoretical and applied issues with only limited relevance for a universal science of reading and literacy. My intention here is not to reiterate my 2008 arguments or even expand them, but to move on to another major obstacle to progress. Before moving on, however, I would like to add a note of optimism to the Anglocentrism debate. In recent years, interest in other languages has indeed begun to emerge from the shadows probably because the scientific community of Anglo-American reading researchers has felt itself “come of age” as a substantial body of well-replicated and converging findings has coalesced in recent years, at least on several key topics such as word identification and dyslexia (Vellutino et al., 2004; Snowling and Hulme, 2005; DeHaene, 2009; Rayner et al., 2012). The field is now witnessing important first steps toward universal models of reading (Perfetti, 2003; Perfetti et al., 2005; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005; Frost, 2012) as well as a growing number of linguistically and grammatologically informed studies emerging outside the confines of English and other European alphabets (Nag and Perfetti, 2014; Saiegh-Haddad and Joshi, 2014; Verhoeven and Perfetti, 2014). It is still the case, nonetheless, that the theoretical and applied frameworks developed for English are all too frequently being applied to other languages and writing systems without due consideration for linguistic and writing system diversity. Almost all publications by English-language researchers continue to omit any “. . .in English” qualification in the titles of their papers—“A New Whiz-Bang+++ Model of Learning to Read”. . . in English?—as if the results of studies conducted in English alone enjoy the privileged status of universal applicability, unlike researchers investigating other languages who are obliged to qualify their findings by adding the “. . .in Chinese/Arabic/Korean etc.” disclaimer which automatically demarcates the findings as language-specific and hence not necessarily universally applicable. Here, I focus on yet another “-ism,” which I call “alphabetism”; the belief that alphabetic writing systems are inherently superior to non-alphabetic systems, and which, like Anglocentrism, has also stymied psychologists’ and educators’ thinking about learning to read across diverse writing systems. Here too, I join other scholars who have also expressed concerns about “alphabetolatry,” or alphabetic “supremacism” (e.g., Rogers, 1995). Looking around the globe, it is apparent that most individuals do not acquire literacy in a European alphabet, yet in many parts of the (nonEuropean) world, the belief that alphabetic orthographies are the ideal has led to calls to alphabetize or discard non-alphabetic scripts. Needless to say, these proposals have profound ramifications for instruction and curriculum. In the past, many influential Western scholars explicitly argued that alphabets are inherently superior to non-alphabetic writing systems (Taylor, 1883; Gelb, 1963; Havelock, 1982). The shelves of most college libraries abound with volumes whose very titles idealize the alphabet (e.g., Diringer’s The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind; Moorhouse’s Triumph of the Alphabet). When reading researchers today seek enlightenment on the subject of writing systems they refer to Gelb—the founding father of the field of “grammatology” (Gelb, 1963). Like Taylor (1883) before him, Gelb (1963) propounded an evolutionary view of writing system history from “primitive” pre-alphabetic systems to alphabetic. Consistent with the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” idea, Gelb’s inexorable “three great steps [logographic-to-syllabicto-alphabetic] by which writing evolved from the primitive stages to a full alphabet” (p. 203) was embraced by almost all reading researchers, despite its repudiation by subsequent scholarship in the field of writing systems research (Mattingly, 1985; Olson, 1989; Daniels, 1992, in press; Rogers, 2005; Coulmas, 2009). Foremost among these, perhaps, was Ferreiro in her Piagetian classic Literacy before Schooling (Ferreiro and Teberosky, 1979) and, subsequently, a series of stage-oriented theories of reading and writing development (Piagetian and non-Piagetian alike) all referring to pre-alphabetic and alphabetic stages (Gough and Hillinger, 1980; Marsh et al., 1981; Frith, 1985; Ehri, 2005). It needs to be pointed out, however, that the