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Science

Skilled Readers Recognize Words By Shape 420

hessian writes "Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists. The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain 'sounds out' words each time we see them."
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Skilled Readers Recognize Words By Shape

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @04:51PM (#38065058)
    Pop quiz! who read it correctly? who read it "first post"?
  • 2nd Grade (Score:5, Funny)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @04:55PM (#38065150) Homepage Journal

    My daughter come home from 2nd Grade every week with a list of 'sight-words' to focus on - that is, words that were intended to be immediately recognized, not sounded out.

    Glad modern science has caught up with elementary school.

  • by Quila ( 201335 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @05:11PM (#38065484)

    As I read, I read to myself in my head, not sounding out letters, but the words as I go. Whenever I see this example of transposition, that voice in my head starts to sound like it has Down syndrome.

  • Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)

    by vlm ( 69642 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @05:16PM (#38065572)

    And at least for myself, the first few times I saw the word "prefect" in Harry Potter, I thought it said "perfect" and kept wondering why they were so arrogant.

    In ye olden days of 5 digit /. UIDs, that was "Ford Prefect" from HHGTTG.

    This also begs the question, of like, um, why completely inappropriately used phrases drive some people bonkers and others don't care. My visual cortex knows that "begs the question" is almost certainly meaningless filler and its application 99.9% of the time has no relation to its actual meaning, so I do not process/see it. Ditto uh, um, like. Perhaps like people in the under 30 crowd process spoken language like in a similar way, explaining why they like have this absolutely desperate like need to fill all pauses with the word "like" whenever they speak, like especially in like public.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @05:18PM (#38065588)

    better that it goes into a buffer, at least, and not straight to /dev/null ...

  • I don't (Score:5, Funny)

    by MagicM ( 85041 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @05:43PM (#38066054)

    read subjects.

  • Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @05:51PM (#38066182) Homepage

    In ye olden days of 5 digit /. UIDs, that was "Ford Prefect" from HHGTTG.

    And in ye olden dayes of 4 digit /. UIDs, it was the captain of your local Praetorian guard unit.

  • by MachDelta ( 704883 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @06:09PM (#38066508)

    One thing my girlfriend does that annoys the absolute piss out of me is ask me questions when i'm deep in thought writing an essay or coding. I swear this is my brain at those moments:

    Active process: writeProgram("Project.cpp")
    HARDWARE INTERRUPT: "Honey do you think I should curl my hair or straighten it for tomorrow?"
    caching audio file...
    Abort module(writeProgram);
    exiting to OS...
    exiting...
    loading Awareness.bat
    paging filesystem
    loading recognition:speech(5849932 bytes)
    loading calendar->tomorrow (4355 bytes)
    loading, hair (34382 bytes)
    loading, woman (0? bytes)
    accessing speech drivers
    Speak: "Ah..bu..wha..."
    IRQ conflict detected!
    resolving conflict
    emptying audio cache
    reloading speech driver...
    Ready.
    WARNING: audio recording length: 0 bytes
    Speak: "Um... yes?" ...
    "Why do you never listen to what I say!??"

  • Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)

    by arcsimm ( 1084173 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @07:40PM (#38067698)
    I am ashamed of how quickly I read that.

Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some rays and became a tangent ?

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