Tale of the broth, the brother and the brothel.

You just did something in about a fifth of a second that took science thirty years to catch.

Spoken English runs on roughly forty four sounds. Teach a child those sounds and you have handed them a way onto a page: look at the letters, make the sounds, hear a word you already know. Play it reverse, sounds, funny shapes (aka letters) on a page and there you have it, reading and writing. That is called phonics teaching in a nutshell (well, in a tiny tiny nutshell) but it does what it says, teaching reading and writing based on sounds.

Most of us still recall seeing an A above an Apple in primary school and being asked to sound out “aaaaaaaaa….” in our classes. But here is the thing, sounds are not what words are made of. Sounds are what words are being carried on. What words are built from is units of meaning.

re- · build · -ing · trans- · port · -er

There are thousands of these, and unlike sounds, every single one of them means something.

Here is the strange bit. Your brain is already doing this splitting exercise even before it understands what it reads. I let you read this again.

In 2004, Kathleen Rastle and her colleagues flashed words at readers so fast it was impossible for them to consciously recognise the words (42ms), then measured how quickly they recognised the word that followed. Flashing the word cleaner before the word CLEAN made recognising CLEAN easier. No surprise. But flashing the word corner made recognising CORN easier too, and a corner has nothing to do with corn. But flashing the word brothel did nothing for BROTH at all, because -el is not a real word part, so the brain never split brothel into broth and -el. There was nothing meaningful to pull out, so it left the word whole.

When reading, the brain is not stopping on letters, it is subconsciously looking for meaningful parts.

Anything with meaning gets pulled apart first and interrogated afterwards. I let you read this one more time. So, they did some brain imaging to measure the speed at which this happens. Using magnetoencephalography (fancy stuff), scientists have found that the split happens at around 170 to 190 milliseconds after a word appears. The actual understanding (‘lexical access’) does not happen until roughly 350 milliseconds, around double the splitting time.

So then what’s up with the broth, the brother and the brothel. Your reading brain always finds broth in a brother first, because it recognises the two meaningful units broth + -er. But it does not find broth in the brothel, because there it cannot pull it into two meaningful units. So broth in the brother, but not in the brothel.

Then you might be wondering why broth, brother and brothel are not semantically connected after all. It is pure coincidence that they look and sound the same as they all have different presumed roots.

Broth is from *bʰrew- (related to the concept of brewing).
Brother from *bʰréh₂tēr (related to the concept of kinship).
Brothel quite possibly *bʰer- (related to the concept of breaking).

… and now you know.

What this means at home

A child’s reading brain will pull painter into two pieces as soon as they understand that -er means something. What decides whether that helps is if they know what -er does to the meaning of a word. Because if they do, they gained a lever that can be applied to 100s of words. To one who paints, one who builds, one who bakes etc.

Where Lex comes in

We are turning word parts into characters, one book at a time, with their meaning embedded in a character, a rhyme, a story, to lay the groundwork for reading comprehension when the time comes. It is all just full-time fun until it suddenly all makes sense.

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