# NATURE AND ACQUISITION OF THE SPEECH CODE AND READING

> **NIH NIH P01** · HASKINS LABORATORIES, INC. · 1994 · $1,188,589

## Abstract

The overall goal of the research program is to understand how the language
apparatus, biologically specialized for speaking and listening, becomes
adapted to reading and writing.

Projects I and II explore the bases of phonology.  Project I is concerned
with the nature and function of the biological specialization (the speech
mode) and with its early development (including cerebral lateralization):
the central hypotheses addressed by its experiments are that the basic unit
of both perception and production is the gesture, and that the phoneme (the
basis of the alphabet) gradually emerges in development from recurrent
patterns of sound and gesture.  Project II principally examines how
gestures are organized into syllables, how complex acoustic changes
associated with shifts in speaking style arise from relatively simple
gestural changes, and how listeners parse the acoustic signal into acoustic
constellations the components of which are the consequence of a single
gesture.

The next three projects study the dependence of reading on the phonological
processes of speaking and listening.  Project III tests the view that
deficits in phonological representation limit the development of
phonological awareness and success in learning to read and spell.  Project
IV draws on both good and poor readers, and on several different writing
systems (Serbo-Croatian, English, Hebrew, Chinese) to study the mechanism
by which readers relate the written word to its spoken form.  Project V
seeks to identify the sources of difficulties in reading at the sentence
level and to forward the goal of early identification of children likely to
develop reading problems; a central hypothesis of this project is that poor
readers' comprehension difficulties reflect a bottleneck in phonological
processing rather than a lag in the mastery of certain syntactic
structures.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 2194780
- **Project number:** 5P01HD001994-29
- **Recipient organization:** HASKINS LABORATORIES, INC.
- **SAM.gov UEI:** HKDXUVASHNE4
- **Principal Investigator:** Carol A Fowler
- **Activity code:** P01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1994
- **Award amount:** $1,188,589
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1976-02-01 → 1996-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2194780

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 2194780, NATURE AND ACQUISITION OF THE SPEECH CODE AND READING (5P01HD001994-29). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/2194780. Licensed CC0.

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