The Science of Word Recognition 430
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.
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...
Though comes before language (Score:5, Informative)
Research shows that
Please (Score:2, Informative)
Article in short... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Comments (Score:2, Informative)
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
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.
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 paper is a scientific literature review for the benefit of people working in typography.
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.
Re:What about other writing systems? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Quotation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I love how (Score:3, Informative)
If you're right-handed, you'll smudge the text with your hand if you write right-to-left.
Re:I love how (Score:2, Informative)
The difference between right-to-left and left-to-right is not in the
reading but in the writing. Right-to-left languages, including
semitic languages that stemmed from Aramaic, were created in a time
before paper. These languages were usually chiseled into hard
materials like marble. Since most people are right handed, they tend
to hold the chisel with that hand, to give themselves more control.
That makes writing from right-to-left easier to read _as you write_.
Try it out.
Left-to-right languages were invented much later, when technology
improved, and the use of paper was common. In those cases writing
from left-to-right made more sense. Since, again, you can read as you
right. I'm not sure what the rational for top-down languages is, but
I'll bet it's something similar to this logic. In most cases in
history, the people who dictate (pun indented) the rules are usually
the creators, and not the users.