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The Psychology of Literacy
What are the intrinsic differences between the literate and the illiterate mind? The Vai, a small West African group, developed their own system of writing that flourishes today, althought no body of written literature exists and about half of those literate in Vai have never had formal schooling. Given this situation, Scribner and Cole were able to test mor than 1,000 subjects over a four-year period to measure the mental advantage of literates over nonliterates. "An ambitious and important book—ambitious in scope and its continual reevaluation of aims and methods . . . and important for putting heretofore unexamined presumptions regarding the gognitive effects of literacy to empirical test."— Language and Society
- GenresLinguisticsPsychology
335 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 3, 2017
I've never used the word "seminal" so much in any other conversations on literacy, so...
May 11, 2007
This is a monumnental work that questions the orality literacy dichotomy proposed by Gooding and Ong. It documents the Vai people who developed their own writing system and learned without any formal education. The authors tested the cognitive processes of those literate in this script comparing them to non-literates, Enlgish literates, and Arabic literates.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews