Ban đầu, ngữ âm là con cưng của các nhà ngôn ngữ học behaviorist, người đưa ra giả thuyết rằng bức thư kích thích gây ra phản ứng âm vị, và người được xác định học để đọc như việc trồng một "thói quen ăn sâu" (Bloomfield, 1942/1961, trang 26) để sản xuất âm thanh cụ thể | 6 CHAPTER 1 tional practices in classroom settings Testimony of G. Reid Lyon 2001 . Of course we are still awaiting the scientific data that will allow US to understand how this particular incentive system will modify teachers belief systems as opposed to just modifying what they say and do in public in order to keep their jobs. Phonics was very much in vogue prior to the contemporary science of meaning-centered reading. Initially phonics was the darling of behaviorist linguists who hypothesized that letter stimuli trigger phonemic responses and who defined learning to read as the cultivation of an ingrained habit Bloomfield 1942 1961 p. 26 to produce specific sounds when looking at specific letters. With the rise of cognitive psychology letters were still converted to sounds but now only in order to recognize and identify words with recognition and identification being part of cognitive psychology s information processing machinery. As Marilyn Adams remarked unless the processes involved in individual word recognition operate properly nothing else in the system can either 1990 p. 6 . Meaning-centered reading theory and whole language transcended both of these paradigms by viewing reading neither as fundamentally involving a sound response to a letter stimulus nor as the informational processing of letters in order to recognize a word but rather as the active construction of meaning. Although Noam Chomsky revolutionized linguistic theory by calling attention to the stimulus-free nature of language use and to the insurmountable problems thereby inherent in behaviorist linguistics Chomsky 1959 cognitive psychology at least in the field of reading still did not advance very far beyond this fatal limitation. It continued to emphasize the physically observable part of written language the letters on the page as the fundamental building blocks of its information processing mechanisms. Alone in this regard meaning-centered reading and whole language took Chomsky s .
