Free Psychology Books: Psychology of Education Major by Peter K. Smith

Psychology of Education Major by Peter K. Smith

The faculty of language stands at the center of our conception of mankind; speech makes us human and literacy makes us civilized. It is therefore both interesting and important to consider what, if anything, is distinctive about written language and to consider the consequences of literacy for the bias it may impart both to our culture and to people’s psychological processes. The framework for examining the consequences of literacy has already been laid out. Using cultural and historical evidence, Havelock (1973), Parry (1971), Goody and Watt (1968), Innis (1951), and McLuhan (1964) have argued that the invention of the alphabetic writing system altered the nature of the knowledge which is stored for reuse, the organization of that knowledge, and the cognitive processes of the people who use that written language. Some of the cognitive consequences of schooling and literacy in contemporary societies have been specified through anthropological and cross-cultural psychological research by Cole, Gay, Glick, and Sharp (1971), Scribner and Cole (1973), Greenfield (1972), Greenfield and Bruner (1969), Goodnow (1976), and others. However, the more general consequences of the invention of writing systems for the structure of language, the concept of meaning, and the patterns of comprehension and reasoning processes remain largely unknown. 

The purpose of this paper is to examine the consequences of literacy, particularly those consequences associated with mastery of the “schooled” language of written texts. In the course of the discussion, I shall repeatedly contrast explicit, written prose statements, which I shall call “texts,” with more informal oral-language statements, which I shall call “utterances.” Utterances and texts may be contrasted at any one of several levels: the linguistic modes themselves— written language versus oral language; their usual usages—conversation, storytelling, verse, and song for the oral mode versus statements, arguments, and essays for the written mode; their summarizing forms—proverbs and aphorisms for the oral mode versus premises for the written mode; and finally, the cultural traditions built around these modes—an oral tradition versus a literate tradition. My argument will be that there is a transition from utterance to text both culturally and developmentally and that this transition can be described as one of increasing explicitness, with language increasingly able to stand as an unambiguous or autonomous representation of meaning.

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