by Dr. Tim Conway; adapted by Dr. BethAnn Pratte
Many are confused by the recent and highly inaccurate statements about Orthographic Mapping. The confusion comes from erroneous statements like saying, “Orthographic Mapping has nothing to do with visual memory.”
These inaccurate statement are made by individuals who are not brain scientists and do not have professional training nor decades of professional expertise in how the human brain works.
Let’s simply look at a key abstract by a researcher, Dr Linea Ehri, who has expertise in studying the development of literacy skills & Orthographic Mapping.
There are only eight (8) sensory inout systems. If one believes that the visual input/visual memory system has nothing to do with Orthographic Mapping, then there are only seven (7) other options:
Auditory
Touch
Taste
Smell
Interoception
Proprioception
Vestibular
For clarification, Dr. Conway added commentary (in parentheses) to Ehri‘s abstract to aid in understanding the information.
“Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning“ by Linnea C Ehri
Scientific Studies of Reading 18 (1), 5-21, 2014
Orthographic mapping (OM) involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings [visual], pronunciations [oral motor, tactile, kinesthetic], and meanings [semantic] of specific words in memory [This means using visual, auditory, oral motor, oral tactile/touch and oral / kinesthetic awareness of movement working together to build multisensory memory]. It explains how children learn to read words by sight [visual aiding decoding & memorization of orthographically irregular aka non-phonetic words that cannot be sounded out], to spell words from memory [visual memory, tactile/motor memory, auditory/phonological], and to acquire vocabulary words from print.
This development is portrayed by a sequence of overlapping phases, each characterized by the predominant type of connection linking spellings of words to their pronunciations in memory [visual, auditory/semantic/phonological, motor].
During development, the connections improve in quality and word-learning value, from visual nonalphabetic [visual], to partial alphabetic [visual], to full grapho-phonemic [visual/motor-auditory], to consolidated grapho-syllabic and grapho-morphemic. OM is enabled by phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowledge.
Recent findings indicate that OM to support sight word reading [visual/phonologocal/motor] is facilitated when beginners are taught about articulatory features of phonemes [motor/kinesthetic/tactile & auditory] and when grapheme-phoneme relations are taught with letter-embedded picture mnemonics [no picture mnemonics were needed for Torgesen, et al’s unparalleled outcomes for severely at risk 5-year olds and typical readers do not need picture mnemonics either].
Vocabulary learning is facilitated when spellings accompany pronunciations and meanings of new words to activate OM. Teaching students the strategy of pronouncing novel words aloud as they read text silently activates OM and helps them build their vocabularies. Because spelling-sound connections [visual/motor-auditory] are retained in memory [visual, motor & auditory memories working together], they impact the processing of phonological constituents and phonological memory for words.”
Access to entire paper.
A sensory pyramid by Lucy Jane Miller, 2011 (PhD, OTR/L) showing that ALL learning begins from the 8 sensory/motor inputs.
