The Dual Route Theory of Reading: How Our Brains Process Text

Read this:

And when Grigory Vassilyevitch wakes up he is perfectly well after it, but Marfa Ignatyevna always has a headache from it. So, if Marfa Ignatyevna carries out her intention to-morrow, they won't hear anything and hinder Dmitri Fyodorovitch.

-Brothers Karmazov, Tolstoy

How did you go when you hit Grigory Vassilyevitch and then Marfa Ignatyevna? Did you feel yourself slowing down? Almost like shifting to a lower gear to navigate some tricky terrain? That's the feeling of effortful decoding.

Yes, even fluent readers like you and me still need to decode from time to time. The dual route theory of reading helps explain why.

The Dual Route Theory of Reading

The dual route theory of reading is special to me because it originated in Australia. Fair bloody dinkum.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a team led by Max Coltheart, now Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University in Newcastle NSW, set out to investigtae how readers could both recognise familiar words rapidly and decode new or nonsense words accurately. They were also interested in clinical cases where brain damage selectively impaired the ability to read some words but not others.

Their research led to a model of how we process print into speech when reading. Coltheart's model comprised two distinct routes - a lexical route (sometimes called a visual route) for recognizing whole words directly and a nonlexical route (sometimes called a phonological, sublexical or dorsal route) for decoding words in smaller parts.

Both routes are activated by written inputs, but process text differently. The nonlexical route, the more scenic, slower route, involves effortful decoding as we consciously figure out the phonology of a new or unfamiliar word. Here try it: polyphiloprogenitive, pulchritudinous, floccinaucinihilipilification.

The lexical - or visual - route is like the reading super highway. Here we read words instantly, recognizing and matching the word's orthography (how it's written), phonology (how it sounds), and meaning effortlessly.

The Journey from One Route to the Other

Beginning readers lean heavily on their non-lexical route to learn print-pronunciation relationships. With practice, these relationships between speech, print, and meaning get stored in long-term memory - a process known as orthographic mapping - making them retrievable via the visual route for more fluent reading.

Early on, it's crucial to teach learners that we use words to convey meaning in both spoken and written forms and that words are made up of morphemes which convey a word's meaning and graphemes which tell us how to pronounce it.

Once this knowledge is internalised it is a matter of repeatedly applying it through reading and composing text. Initially, working with simple short passages and simple decodable texts before moving to richer more complex text. In the process, we shift the cognitive load from learning to read to reading to learn.

Making Sense of It All

The dual route model of reading helps us to appreciate the incredible mechanisms that we rely upon to read proficiently. It explains why beginning readers need strong support in developing their decoding skills while building their sight word vocabulary, ultimately leading to fluent reading on that reading super highway.

Aussie, aussie, aussie. Oi oi oi.

Nb: Full credit to Professor Max Coltheart for the Brothers Karamazov idea.