The principal- factor that distinguishes reading from other looking activities is the languaging process. Reading involves the comprehension of conceptualizations represented in the form of graphic signs (markings which structure light) that have no necessary relationship to the conceptualization they represent-the graphic signs do not "look like" the ideas being communicated. Unlike photographs, realistic paintings, drawings, caricatures, or stick figures, the letters of the alphabet, graphic forms of words, and other components of the writing (graphological) system do not resemble any of the objects or events (real or imagined) they are meant to represent. Rather, like the spoken language upon which it is based, the printed language is a highly encoded representation of human thought (conceptualizations). Thus, unlike forms of looking in which structured optical information formed by objects or the pictographic likeness of objects is represented and stored in visual SIS for direct processing by focal attention (in STM) for use in conceptualizing, looking-as-reading involves a decoding stage, in which the printed symbols are converted into language signs, which can then be used in conceptualizing.
As in auding, then, the reader must attend to an environmental display and convert it into an internal language display which can then be used in conceptualizing. According to the present model, the internal language used in reading is the oral language used in speaking and auding. By this we mean that the signs and rules for sequencing these signs (syntax) used in auding are also used in reading. In learning to read, the child must learn that printed words stand for spoken words. Now, since spoken words are composed of programs of articulatory movements (p. 55), for the child to recognize that the printed word corresponds to the spoken word means that he must associate a printed display with the internal articulatory program that controls the production of the word aloud.
As we have seen, Durkin's (1966) children who learned to read "naturally" (primarily in an untutored setting prior to formal schooling) somehow came to realize that speech is made up of words, printed words "stand for" those words, and the printed words are made up of letter elements.1
It is important to note that those early-reading children did not attempt to use words to "directly" express some conceptualization, nor did they associate printed words directly with some conceptualization while failing to associate the printed with the spoken word. Rather, they conceived of the printed word as an alternative form of the spoken word-in other words, conceptually, for these children print was conceived as speech written down.