Literacy Advantages Beyond Reading: Prediction of Spoken Language

Published on May 14, 2019

Literacy has many obvious benefits: it exposes the reader to a wealth of new information and enhances syntactic knowledge. However, we argue that literacy has an additional, often overlooked, benefit: it enhances people’s ability to predict spoken language thereby aiding comprehension. Readers are under pressure to process information more quickly than listeners and reading provides excellent conditions – in particular, a stable environment – for training the predictive system. It also leads to increased awareness of words as linguistic units and to more fine-grained phonological and additional orthographic representations, which sharpen lexical representations and facilitate the retrieval of predicted representations.

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