IF WE WEREN'T BORN TO READ, AS MARYANNE WOLF CLAIMS IN PROUST AND THE SQUID, HOW COME THERE ARE SO MANY BOOKS?

摘要

"We were never born to read," begins Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (HarperCollins, $25.95). Noam Chomsky's research on language acquisition revealed that spoken language is probably an innate ability, but according to Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, it has taken several thousand years for our brains to develop the circuitry for the more sophisticated tasks of reading and writing. A need to keep track of things like the movement of the stars and planets, the storage and exchange of goods, and the dates of wars may have spurred ancient civilizations to begin keeping written records, first with primitive stone markings in the form of logograms (Sumerian), then syllabaries (Akkadian), and hieroglyphs (Egyptian, Mayan).