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.
I'm not sure I buy it. (Score:2, Interesting)
To make it more obvious, stick a tall letter in a word that only has short letters and you'll come away thinking word shape does matter.
(or did he explain it... there were way to many words and way too few glossy pictures in that article for me to comprehend it)
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.
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: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]
How we read... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hree is an epamxle of jsut taht, it's qitue esay to raed, ins't it? Agulohth it can get plluartraicy hrad wtih the lgnoer wdros.
rn vs. m (Score:1, Interesting)
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.)
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?
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.
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.
Re:Reduced Redudancy (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't shout! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
Re:How we read... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 when placed in a sentance. So long as the word was the correct length, your brain could extrapolate the meaning and create a meaningful sentance out of it.
Re:I'm not sure I buy it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
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
Re:I love how (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm not sure I buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Quotation (Score:3, Interesting)
-Lars
Re:Ahem... (Score:1, Interesting)
To my non-American eyes, that is exactly the sort of thing that makes America look ridiculous. Sorry, but it is. Those people would only look marginally crazier if they were bowing down before a statue of a giant slug and hailing it lord of mankind.
Re:Thought comes before language (Score:3, Interesting)
The grandparent also didn't say "couldn't be expressed", but "has no word". Given enough verbiage, you can (probably) express any word in one language in any other language, but that's not what you want to do in conversation.
And if the "language of Shakespeare" is so all-encompassing, why has English since then been stealing words from other languages like a slum rat during a riot in a shopping mall? Mind you, I think this is a good feature that adds expressiveness to the language, but it clearly shows that there are things that English speakers consider important enough to be able to express succinctly that they'll bring in foreign words for it.
-Lars
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.
amusing test... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I love how (Score:3, Interesting)
It gets a bit different for Japanese though. In Chinese(once again, for the most part) you can process character by character and read the sentence. However, because Japan had to force the Chinese character system to it's language(and also borrowed readings, then newer readings without changing the old ones) each character has usually 2 readings, some only 1, some much more. How you read the character depends on the characters around it. To a certain extent it's like English, you really cannot read it character for character phonetically, you have to process blocks. I wonder if the Japanese reader uses the same parts of the brain as the English reader, or Chinese reader, or both.
Source code? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think Chinese is similar (Score:3, Interesting)
First, Chinese characters are often composed of several smaller characters, 500 or so, instead of the 70'ish letters and numerals (including capitals) in English. We say such a character may have a "moon" sub-character on the left, a "white" on the right and so on. The sub-characters can be partial clues to meaning and pronunciation (e.g. a left moon usually signifies part of a body, and the a right moon means its sounds like "bai"), but there are no steadfast rules. Just like in English where the pronunciation can vary from the spelling, and the whole meaning vary from those of the prefix and root. But Chinese breaks the rules more often, probably since many of the characters have been around 3000 years- seven times longer than modern English spelling rules. The Korean writing system is totally planned and recent, so it is very logical. The sub-characters represent the beginning, vowel, and end of a syllable, gracefully packed into a square.
Second, you can trace the boundaries of Chinese characters too and see distinguishing characteristics. They might have a gap in one corner, a ragged stroke defining an edge, etc. Just like in English words a learner will move from observing the strokes and sub-characters into the gestalt of the whole character. Just like any other language, chinese characters are contextual. Combinations are sematically constrained to one to four syllable word. And they are grammatically constrained to expect nouns, verbs, modifiers, etc, in certain sequences.
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.
Larson has his detractors (Score:2, Interesting)
Following a day's sessions on legibility and word recognition, the Thessaloniki conference held a round table on legibility and the processes of word recognition, chaired by John Hudson and participants Mary Dyson, Hrant Papazian, Kevin Larson and Peter Enneson.
Re:REKANYZE! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thought comes before language (Score:2, Interesting)
The approprately clunky sounding phrase to express the thought related in your second sentence is "concatenative assemblage".
Re:Reduced Redudancy (Score:3, 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.
Wow. Not only did I do what you did, but not-even-reading your post, I picked out "ham___er", "hamster", "hammer", and "we", and tried to figure out if you were suggesting that "we" fit in the missing space, and he meant to say "hamweer".
Fantasy and Science Fiction writers take notice! (Score:3, Interesting)
"N'kalogh leapt onto his mighty huyloch and rode across the plains of V'looth'u". Next please.
This paper gives a convincing pyschological model about why this occurs and it is pretty much what I had surmised on my own.
So, from now on, please name all of your aliens Bob, Larry, Bubba, or Charles.
Re:Eye tracker experiments (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems if you don't blink whilst reading it's like trying to eat food in big chunks... At least for some people. Then again it may be the stress of keeping your eyes open distracting you from reading?
My postulate is that the brain takes the blink time to dedicate more resources to processing and understanding what is read.
Coz it's amazing how much "brain CPU" vision/sight takes up for most people. I've got people (kids + adults) to try to do certain coordination tricks - like drawing a circle with the right hand whilst drawing a square with the right foot, or doing an OK sign with the left hand palm facing upwards, L sign with index and thumb of right hand, palm facing downwards, and then rolling hands over - switching to L with left palm down and and OK sign with right palm up, and back again.
I find that most people find it easier to learn how to do such stuff if they have their eyes closed and visualize it whilst doing it. Once they get it, they can do it with their eyes open.
Unfortunately many tasks that require high coordination require your eyes to be open
There seems to be a "brain state" difference between having my eyes open or closed. I find it harder to stand and balance on one foot with my eyes closed compared to with my eyes open EVEN THOUGH it is totally dark and my eyesight is useless, or I am blindfolded. (Of course it is much easier with my eyes open and the surroundings visible
I am not a scientist, and I haven't done a formal study on these items. So it's just anecdotal, but feel free to go do one - would be good if the resulting study is published somewhere on the internet.
Re:Thought comes before language (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I love how (Score:3, Interesting)
This actually happens in English, too, but we've been trained not to think of it that way.
* I'd like to hang up that picture.
* I don't know where to hang that picture up.
* His friends are going to move out at the end of the month.
* Is he going to help move his friends out?
Most of the time when you are "ending a sentence with a preposition," you are actually doing no such thing--you are using a seperable verb. But because we write them as two separate words even when they are next to each other, we don't really think of them as being that closely related anymore. Also the fact that those "particles" (the technical term for them) look and sound exactly like prepositions helped lead to the confusion.
I remember in my introductory syntax class, we spent about a week proving that the sentence structures for English and German were virtually identical, but mirror images of each other. (things that German tended to move to the back, English tended to move to the front, and vice versa) but we had to diagram an awful lot of sentences to get to that point.
Re:Eye tracker experiments (Score:3, Interesting)
As for why people blink at a specific rate, and whether that changes based on level of concentration, that's been studied.
"Studies have measured the blink rate and tearing on computer workers and noted that the blink rate dropped very significantly during work at a computer compared to before and after work. There was no significant change in tearing. The data support the fact that blink rate decreases during computer use, but also show that other tasks can decrease the blink rate. [cvconsulting.com]
Possible explanations for the decreased blink rate include concentration on the task or a relatively limited range of eye movements. Although both book reading and computer work result in significantly decreased blink rates, a difference between them is that computer work usually requires a higher gaze angle, resulting in an increased rate of tear evaporation. Since the main route of tear elimination is through evaporation and the amount of evaporation roughly relates to eye opening, the higher gaze angle when viewing a computer screen results in faster tear loss. It is also likely that the higher gaze angle results in a greater percentage of blinks that are incomplete. It has been suggested that incomplete blinks are not effective because the tear layer being replenished is 'defective' and not a full tear layer."
Which suggests that my blink rate may go up now that I have bifocals, since I have to look through the bottom of them for close-up work (lower gaze angle). I think a lot of the dry eye that I get is from the a/c, anyway.