Carol A. Fowler's Perspective on Language by Eye

ABSTRACT

This article considers highlights of Carol Fowler's development as a scientist against the background of major developments in the fields of ecological psychology, speech research, and the psychology of language. Beginning from her graduate student years, the focus is on those aspects of Fowler's research that pertain most directly to the relations between speech and reading.

Acknowledgments

I thank Carol Fowler, Leonard Katz, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, and Michael Turvey for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹ The science alluded to in this section and the next is discussed by Turvey (this issue).

² To enable language to be productive, its elementary particles, the phoneme segments, must be meaningless (gaining meaning ordinarily only in combination), as Studdert-Kennedy (2005) argued in his explication of the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems.

³ As Fowler (1981) noted, the use of phonological awareness in promoting decoding abilities essential for developing skill in word recognition is not the only way that phonology is important in reading. Another use of phonology is to provide a vehicle for working memory during reading of connected text for meaning (see Baddeley, 1979; Shankweiler & Crain, 1986; Shankweiler, Liberman, Mark, Fowler, & Fischer, 1979).

⁴ This has remained Fowler's position, as is apparent in her discussion 30 years later (C. A. Fowler, 2011). For similar reasons, Fowler rejects the related hypothesis that learners in the course of becoming skilled acquire a separate visual lexicon. She prefers the alternative that there is one lexicon containing both graphic and linguistic information, not least because it is more economical.