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The Science of Word Recognition
Posted by
michael
on Thu Sep 02, 2004 04:02 AM
from the paris-in-the-the-spring dept.
from the paris-in-the-the-spring dept.
neile writes "I stumbled across a fascinating paper over at the Microsoft Typography site today that provides a really nice overview of the different theories on how humans read. If you thought we read by recognizing word shapes, think again! With the assistance of fancy eye-tracking cameras researchers have been able to devise several clever experiments to give us new insight into how reading works." We've linked to some of Larson's work previously.
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AAAAAARRGGHHH, I'm going blind! (Score:5, Funny)
Honest!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Honest!!! (Score:5, Funny)
(in big letters) If you can read this,
(in slightly smaller letters)you obviously must have
(in still smaller letters)very good eyesight.
(in smaller letters)While you're down here, why don't you give me a blow job?
Parent
Oh no! (Score:3, Funny)
"If you are reading this then you owe Microsoft royalies"
In related news... (Score:3, Funny)
The USSGN (Union of Slashdot Spelling and Grammar Nazis) is expected to stage protests against the new product in the interest of keeping their jobs.
Eye movements? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh they must have been using EyeQ [infmind.com]....
I can read at 44692 words per minute! Thanks for posting that long article for me to read, I needed the exercise.
And thank you EyeQ! Your the greatest!
Really though, they say that the more letters/words mean faster reading times [microsoft.com]. It's true. Think about a book or article you've read. When the words are together on the page it's easier to read because your eyes can jump around letting your brain fill in the blanks.
Ever read something that made sense but you couldn't quote it word for word? It's likely because you read in this same way.
Quotation (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I'm so glad they finally figured this out...
Re:Quotation (Score:3, Interesting)
For example: "sadhoslt nwes for nrdes. Sfutf taht mrttaes". (I think ive got that correct, someone will obviously correct me if not
Your brain didnt need the middle of the word to understand the word
I love how (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love to see a study comparing how english is read to how chinese is read by native speakers. Very interesting i would gather.
Re:I love how (Score:3, Interesting)
I just searched around on google and these documents come up
Word Order in German [about.com]
Kathol's analysis of German Word Order [let.rug.nl]
Though comes before language (Score:5, Informative)
Research shows that
Parent
Re:Thought comes before language (Score:4, Interesting)
Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go unspoken when they get older.
Absolutely. And adults can "relearn" those distinctions, too; I found that as my Japanese studies progressed (started at 19, pretty close to native now) the range of things I was able to think about expanded considerably--so much so that now I sometimes have trouble speaking to people in English because English doesn't have a word for the concept I'm thinking about.
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Re:Thought comes before language (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I love how (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe we can learn even more about our way of reading, like: Is it the most efficient?
Is right to left, or left to right the best way to go.
Interesting side note (don't know why I'm bringing this up...) President #20, James A. Garfield could write in both Latin and Greek at the same time?
Parent
Re:I love how (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember reading about an interesting study into this. Apparently, there are a small number of people who have a particular form of brain damage which effectively reverses their perception. These people, if they were originally educated to read/write left to right, would afterwards naturally read/write right to left, or vice versa.
Apparently, once they get used to using their right hand with a style similar to that a left-hander would use (or vice-versa) they can read & write in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate a normal person can in the usual direction. The conclusion: the difference is not noticeable; neither left to right nor right to left is substantially more efficient (or any difference is also negated by the brain damage these people have suffered).
No, I can't cite references. I just came across it about 10 years ago, I don't even remember what I was studying at the time.
Parent
Re:I love how (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, Chinese is character-based, not letter-based, so the research would be completely different. Kind of like asking someone who's studying jet aircraft to study cars as more people have them.
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Re:I love how (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Reading about how we read (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't let the Microsoft name scare you off - the article makes for a fascinating look (pun intended) into how we read. I wonder, though, if these findings are duplicated with written Oriental languages.
What about other writing systems? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about other writing systems? (Score:5, Interesting)
Want my theory? I think the brain uses multiple techniques in parallel, then releases resources from the ones found to be going nowhere. So at any one time you may be trying to read a word letter-by-letter, recognising the word from the Bouma shape, and picking likely words from context. The different techniques will have different successes depending on various factors (clean type vs. messy handwriting, familiar vs unfamiliar words, &c). So my theory is that the brain is trying various methods at the same time, each narrowing down the possibilities, and just goes with whatever produces a result first. As soon as that happens, any half-finished tests in progress are scrapped and their resources deallocated. The eye movements may well have something to do with this
If all this sounds inefficient, you have to remember that human beings are optimised for non-optimum conditions
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Re:What about other writing systems? (Score:3, Informative)
Reduced Redudancy (Score:4, Informative)
The final conclusions are similar to what I learned in my college linguistics classes 15 years ago. Language contains a lot of redundancy. The reason is that we often encounter situations of so-called "reduced redundancy". For example, someone might have sloppy handwriting so you can't make out all of the letters. Or you might be talking to someone while they brush their teeth. If language were highly optimized, we wouldn't understand a thing in these situations, but because of redundancy we can usually communicate very effectively.
The same applies to reading. The conclusions of the paper seem trivial to me. Of course, reading exploits "visual" and "contextual" information. How else would be understand a sentence like "The boy ate a ham___er" (with a few letters obscured)?
The fact that the brain's neural net adds up the weighted lexicographic, syntactic, semantic (and even pragmatic) information available to it in order to interpret language should be familiar to anyone who's read Goedel, Escher, Bach. And that was published in 1979...
Re:Reduced Redudancy (Score:5, Interesting)
What a way to prove your point. I kept thinking "hamster", "hammer" and then eventually realised that I didn't spot your miss-spelling of 'we' and that I read right over it and filled in the blank.
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Re:Reduced Redudancy (Score:3, Informative)
This got slashdotted!? The idea of recognizing words by "word shape" seems so silly to me that I almost feel as if the author is attacking a straw man rather than a widely accepted linguistic theory.
The author is aiming the article at typographers, not linguists and psychologists. It seems that while everyone who does scientific research into the way that we read has known for a long time that the word shape theory is full of crap, the theory persists as a kind of urban myth among typographers. So the
So ... (Score:5, Insightful)
For what i know abaout japanese, they don't use spaces between 'words'. A single kanji represents the whole word and their outline is always more or less square. So the whole bouma theory fails here, as he finds out.
I'm sure they could leard more interesting things in other writing sysmtems
Re:So ... (Score:4, Informative)
English = character-based
It's like comparing apples and oranges - two completely different ways a written language is interpreted.
I think they're not quite as different as many people seem to think though.
Most kanji are composed of more primitive components. From observing myself reading Japanese, I've noticed that I make many of the same mistakes in recognition, and use similar tricks in recognizing unknown kanji, as I do when reading english. For instance, I frequently confuse two kanji because they have mostly the same primitive components, but differ in one (often the radical -- even though it's arguably the most important part of a kanji, I find I tend to ignore it when reading!).
In my opinion it's not unreasonable to think of the parts of a kanji as being like letters and the whole thing as being like a word.
Parent
This was a very interesting paper. (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, more work needs to be done to consider the visual cues outside the focus of attention. It is here that, I believe, shape and form cue the reader, more than letter shapes do, as to the potential content of the text to come. (Exactly how is for the geniuses.)
Focuses on 1 script, 1 language (Score:5, Insightful)
While some of the results here are interesting (but old), the fact that the entire study focuses on exactly 1 script and 1 language basically renders the conclusions worthless (as conclusions about cognition in general... I suppose they still have value as conclusions about English and the Latin script).
What has happened here is:
1 -- Observe people reading a given language/script
2 -- See how they make use of features of that particular language/script, such as tall letters, case, and the occurrence of 'skippable' words such as articles
3 -- Describe the way they use these local features, and call that a theory of reading in general.
I don't really understand how to apply a theory of reading based on word and letter shapes when there are so many people reading text in which:
--There are no letter boundaries, and/or
--There are no word boundaries, and/or
--Letters all have the same form factor
The experiments described would probably generalize very well to arabic and greek scripts, pretty well to cyrillic (no tall/short letters to speak of), badly to devanagari-type scripts, very badly to Chinese and Japanese, and not at all to hieroglyphics (though I agree that there may never have been a reader of hieroglyphics who was fluent by modern standards).
To pretend that these experiments apply to humanity in general rather than the author's own language/script choice is silly. It's an interesting article and I'm glad the research was done but unfortunately a certain failure to 'get' the multilingual nature of humanity, which I don't really expect to find in MS work, is in evidence here.
Re:Focuses on 1 script, 1 language (Score:5, Insightful)
Now someone else can work on a PhD Thesis by taking his work and seeing if it applies in other languages.
Isn't this how science works? You do research, try to make some conclusions, and publish the results. If you wait to publish until you've found the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, then nobody publishes anything and science doesn't advance at all.
I'm not sure that he missed anything. He has started with what he knows and has resources to study.
Parent
Re:Focuses on 1 script, 1 language (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what is also silly? To pretend that this was the conclusion, although clearly the paper nowhere stated that it had found the grand unified theory of how people read. Here's a hint: when the paper talks about reading, it is obviously talking about reading English.
Yes, the paper would be even more interesting if it included studies of other scripts, and the failure to acknowledge the existence of other scripts should be criticised. But the rest of your criticism is unfounded.
Parent
or maybe it's both? (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously it can't all be shape, there are plenty of words with identical shapes and yet these are distinguishable.
But it could certainly be true that we use shape and parallel letter recognition at the same time. Shape narrows the field of possibilities from millions to a small handful, and then parallel recognition chooses one of the options.
Whatever happens, you can be sure it's terribly complicated, extremely robust and very efficient.
Don't shout! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't shout! (Score:5, Informative)
People can easily be trained to read text in caps as fast as lowercase text - or mirrored text.
What I fail to understand is how randomizing the middle letters of a word doesnt affect reading much. I had hoped he would use that as an example.
Tihs is a emxpale of the efecft.
Parent
FTA... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm surprised this guy is actually working with ClearType. That is just a simple way of making characters appear better by using sub-pixels to increase character resolution. I would think this type of work would be better applied in optical character recognition, maybe even with cursive handwriting.
Microsoft Research Web Site (Score:5, Informative)
Aplogise for the tangent, on the back of this article seemed an apt place to point to the MS research site for those that might not of been aware of it.
Phonemic information mandatory? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can not believe this is in a serious paper. Mandatory? Please. What about people born deaf? Are they all unable to read?
amusing test... (Score:5, Interesting)
Read it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Article in short... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:How we read... (Score:5, Informative)
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
But soon enough there was a counter example:
Anidroccg to crad cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr.
In the counter example, the letters are not randomly scrabled, the letters are in reverse order, except the first and last letters.
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Re:How we read... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:aaah!! eyes hurt! (Score:5, Funny)
re-nerding! ha ha. Best... typo... ever...
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Re:aaah!! eyes hurt! (Score:5, Informative)
dunno, firefox / moz has one of my favourite features
tools
great for annoying "web site designers" who can't design for shit
Parent
Well, it does in a way. (Score:4, Interesting)
The FArticle does, in fact, address this, though not directly - it puts forth a theory that all letters in a word are absorbed simultaneously, and the brain re-orders them. This is given as theory #3, admittedly a ways down.
This gets me thinking, though, about the importance of context. If you drew the letters PLEORBM in a Scrabble game, it might take a while to see the word staring at you. But in the context of a (mangled) sentence: "you can sitll raed tish wouthit a pleorbm," it much more easily jumps out. Interesting.
Parent
Re:I'm not sure I buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I'm not sure I buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I'm not sure I buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine the brain's focus as little perception boxes, scanning up and down the concatenated sentence until enough symbols are aligned to fire a recognition signal... As I read your post above, I find my eyes darting about a little more, actually darting to the center of the "word" once recognition is made.
runonsentencewithlowercase -- here's your letter by letter scan "mode"
runonsentencewithcoloring -- slightly easier to define word boundaries by color
runonSENTENCEwithuppercase -- it's easier to locate the word SENTENCE because we perceive a boundary beween small letters and upper letters.
runo nsente ncewit hbads pacing -- pain in the ass, but we still comprehend
run on sentence with lowercase -- whitespace speeds compehension.
Parent
Interesting observation (Score:5, Interesting)
Example:
'uesdnatnrd' wasn't to hard to recognize beacuase 'uesd' and 'tnrd' aren't letter patterns that exist in real words. So the mind works quicker to rearrange the letters to find a real word.
'aulaclty' was much harder because it's almost pronouncable. 'lac' and 'lty' are common patterns from real words, and 'aul' might not be common but it's pronouncable.
Just an observation.
Parent
Re:REKANYZE! (Score:5, Insightful)
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!
Parent
Re:REKANYZE! (Score:5, Interesting)
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