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."
first pnst!! (Score:5, Funny)
I don't (Score:5, Funny)
read subjects.
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I always suspected that I read like that. I only have to spell words I don't know, or chop them up into syllables.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
It also explains why we can just as easily read mispelt words where only some of the letters have been switched around. It's not which letters that get switched, but the resulting shape, that determines whether the word is easily readable or not.
It's also why certain words are constantly spelt incorrectly or mistaken for one another. Not only are the sounds of the variations similar, and sometimes the meaning, but so are the shapes. E.g., you don't see people mistake "they're" for "their", but you see people mistake "there" for "their" and vice versa all the time. Or for that matter, "then" and "than", "effect" and "affect". 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.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
And another thing: English is not my native language and I know a lot of English words I have never heard. Yet I can read them no problem. Another fact in favor of the theory in the article.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
And another thing: English is not my native language and I know a lot of English words I have never heard. Yet I can read them no problem. Another fact in favor of the theory in the article.
I am a native speaker and I've learned many words in writing before I learned them in speech. As a result, some of my pronunciations are nonstandard. I pronounce "comparable" as if it were "compare" + "able", even though the standard way is irregular, "comp" + "arable". I tried to pronounce these words from how they were written before I'd heard them.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
And another thing: English is not my native language and I know a lot of English words I have never heard. Yet I can read them no problem. Another fact in favor of the theory in the article.
I am a native speaker and I've learned many words in writing before I learned them in speech. As a result, some of my pronunciations are nonstandard. I pronounce "comparable" as if it were "compare" + "able", even though the standard way is irregular, "comp" + "arable". I tried to pronounce these words from how they were written before I'd heard them.
I don't know why this is even up for debate. If you look at any ideogram languages, you can't just sound out each word. Especially Chinese, where there are character that sound the same but have different characters. Or even the same character can be read differently depending on context. You definitely memorized the shape. The article is definitely right that we must be storing a visual dictionary of sorts. If we had to sound out each word, then ideogram languages would have never been invented, too inefficient.
But this also doesn't mean that you don't also associate shapes to sounds. The reason you pronounce it like "compare" + "able" is because you associated the shape "compare" to its sound and "able" to its sound. When put together, it would come out as "compare" + "able". This doesn't prove that you sound out the words as you see them. However, English is a language that runs on syllables, and "compare" is a multiple syllable word, so it gets broken up in the official pronunciation of the word comparable.
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You're a native Latin speaker? My complements on being so ... alive.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
that was "Ford Prefect" from HHGTTG.
Well, to be fair, if you knew what a Ford Prefect [wikipedia.org] actually was, you'd never confuse it with "perfect." XD
As to the use (misuse?) of "stock phrases" like "beg the question", I assume that some people use those phrases idiomatically (i.e., no literal meaning intended) because they heard someone else they thought worthy of emulating doing so. Because of this, they don't consider if the literal phrase makes sense ("How do I do... what?").
In the specific (and hilariously controversial*) case of "beg the question", it's possible to torture a nearly-sensible literal meaning out of the phrase ("This begs the question" == "This begs someone to ask the question"), so the correct use derived from the original Latin phrase [lander.edu] (and only sensible in light of Latin's vocabulary and grammar) will die out within a couple of generations, except in philosophical specialist material.
*Case in point [begthequestion.info]
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Yes (Score:4)
My experience has been that placeholder words like 'um' and 'like' mostly indicate that the speaker isn't done yet and a 'meaningful pause' invites interruption.
Skilled speakers practice pauses, but not filled with umms or errrs. Example of harnessing a stammer into pauses in The King's Speech is a fair example.
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Funny but I could have told them this decades ago. I have a learning disability but can read very well as long as I don't have to read out loud. I also have a terrible time reading anything in all upper case.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is harder to read:
This first sentence which is typed correctly and is correctly formatted...
oR thIS SeConD seNTeNcE wHiCh yOU PrObaBLy doNT reCOgNiZe thE ShaPe oF?
Thanks to annoying people on facebook, I'm sure we all already knew this.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a very good proof, I don't think. By reading the first and last couple of characters of each word and measuring their relative lengths, I seem to read that without any trouble at all. A better test would be to remove the whitespace:
oRthISSeConDseNTeNcEwHiChyOUPrObaBLydoNTreCOgNiZethEShaPeoF?
Or even to insert wrong spacing:
oRth ISSe ConDseNTeNc Ew HiChy OUP rObaBL ydoNTreCO gNiZe thEShaP eoF?
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting- I read about two or three times as fast as my wife and we've talked abou this before.
(frustrating when trying to read an e-mail together on the same PC at the same time).
She does sound out words in her head- I don't- I just tend to zip over them. There again- speed has its consequences- she tends to remember what she read better than I do.
I'll be reading a book and then realise I've been on auto-pilot for the last 3 pages and actually have no recollection of what I just read.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll be reading a book and then realise I've been on auto-pilot for the last 3 pages and actually have no recollection of what I just read.
That happens to me too, but what makes it especially annoying is that when I re-read, I recognize it and slowly start remembering what I read.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll be reading a book and then realise I've been on auto-pilot for the last 3 pages and actually have no recollection of what I just read.
That happens to me too, but what makes it especially annoying is that when I re-read, I recognize it and slowly start remembering what I read.
This happens all the time when my wife is talking at me, the buffer space fills up and lag starts hitting, especially if what I'm hearing is boring or repetitive or uninteresting "Why are you wasting all that time on /. blah blah and the garbage needs to be taken out and blah blah blah" and two minutes later I notice she mentioned taking the trash out so I stand up to do it, and she knows why there was a two minute tape delay and she gets more annoyed. Oh well.
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better that it goes into a buffer, at least, and not straight to /dev/null ...
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Funny)
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!??"
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Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Colleague came into my office the other day, just as I was disappearing up the arses of two databases at once (one Postgres, one SQL Server). She asked me if I wanted to go for coffee. Apparently, it took well over a minute to get anything approaching a coherent answer, and the answer was "You'd better go. If you wait until I can answer that question your break will be over." I barely even remember it, other than the unpleasant sensation of trying to drag myself out of there one layer of mess at a time. First time that's ever happened, hope it's the last.
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It might... Maybe that way, I wouldn't get crap out of them :)
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Does she convert a written word into sounds, letter by letter and syllable by syllable, or does her brain have a direct word-shape-to-sound lookup table?
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I don't know exactly how it sounds in her head or how her brain works- but, yes, she says she sounds out words in her head as she reads.
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This is how I read things. My biggest problems is when I see a shape of a word I misinterpret it as another word because the two words are similarly shaped.
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Yes, this happens all the time to me too...
We'll be driving down the road- and I'll start laughing- my wife will ask "what are you laughing at" - and I'll tell her that a sign I just read I initially misread as something dirty.
It's odd how misread words usually turn out to be something dirty.
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I just drove cross-country and had that same experience, though I blame it on random crud getting stuck on my glasses having not cleaned them after being stuck in a car all day. My favorite? "KY SLIPPERY" next to a bridge. (ICY)
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I'll be reading a book and then realise I've been on auto-pilot for the last 3 pages and actually have no recollection of what I just read.
I find I only do this when I'm tired. It is a good indication that I should put the book down and fall asleep. It actually works rather well, because often my brain isn't ready for sleep when I get in bed, but having this happen while reading I'll know I can fall asleep within a few minutes.
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I'll be reading a book and then realise I've been on auto-pilot for the last 3 pages and actually have no recollection of what I just read.
I've done this too, which is why I often tend to read by sounding things out. I'm pretty sure this helps with writing and grammar skills too, since you get not only the meaning but the way the sentence flows and sounds (as anyone who has tried to figure out an improperly written sentence should have noticed). I always sound out sentences when writing.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I'm also mildly dyslexic (not enough to impact me significantly: I think reading a lot when I was young helped overcome any
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Her slowness is due to the need to synchronize the simultaneous inputs.
But she's better off than you, because she can speed up if she decides to read "intelligently". Most sentences and phrases in paragraphs are not essential, and can be
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Good! You're making an effort to use more than just your eyes...
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Fiction does weird things. If I read an epic that spans several months, in fifteen minutes' time I'm snapping out of an altered state of consciousness where several months have passed. My memory is an interpret-and-rewrite model, where the consequences of an instruction are the permanent storage--so if I read something, my memory is of what the thing is rather than of reading it. I don't recall ever reading several of the Thomas Covenant books, but I recall being there...
Things like The Gap Cycle more
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I was going to post and then I realized you'd literally posted everything I was going to say.
so...
same here!
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I first realized I did this when in highschool and was forced to read Things Fall Apart. When taking the test I couldn't even spell/pronounce the main character's name. Luckily, I was able to recognize it later on in the test where the name was typed out.
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I am also a very fast reader, but often when reading new material I skim through it quickly and later will go back and reference if needed. Those times I do need to reference for more details, I know exactly where it is on the page, but I can't remember exactly what it said. Similarly, I couldn't tell you what I just read, but if you ask a question that was answered in it, I will just *know* the answer without being able to tell you exactly w
This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting. I was under the impression that this is common sense. Maybe I should have spoken it out aloud in order to get all the praise. ;) Pretty interesting still to know that this is scientifically proven now. I wonder if this could be used for learning another language.
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I've been reading since age 3 and read at 1500 wpm with 100% comprehension. I could have told them long ago that this is how I do it.
It's part of my autism.
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No, the brain is rather good at filtering out trivial information ... hence why you can ready letters regardless of which font they are in.
Do you have a problem reading a letter in different fonts? No? Why would you assume its any different?
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Most fonts are about the same shape, except for fonts which mimic cursive (at least in English). The style and feel are different, but the shapes stay largely unchanged.
For me, it explains why it takes me longer to read actual text in fixed width fonts, and why I often forget that variable names in my programs also happen to be English words.
And it's not reading ability, it's reading speed, which I'd be hesitant to trust self-assessment on with metrics.
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you ask a group of people to self-assess for leadership skill, eighty percent report above average leadership skills. What seems to be happening is that each person defines leadership as heaps of whichever skill component he/she happens to possess, and not so much of the skill components he/she lacks. They are all telling the truth with respect to variable criteria.
So I'm wondering, does autism define "comprehend" the same way a non-autistic person does? I read about half that speed, and I don't feel limited by word recognition, but more by the multiple processes of figuring out where the author is coming from (or not, if the agenda is to apply lipstick to a mental vacuum). There are so many layers to discourse analysis it's hard to list them all.
"Comprehend" could mean retaining information points presented as fact. Or it could mean assigning the dribble of factoids into mental categories "pulled from ass", "brandishing urban legend", "regurgitated from recent popular news story", "manufactured in a pique of convenience", "seduced by right-thinking glean", "outright deception", etc. It's a lot of work when reading to man the airport scanner of psychological bogosity.
Furthermore, these assessments are fluid and tentative and require a large working reserve of rewritable storage. A model of the author as a reliable or unreliable human being is formed, if the assessment is to care enough to do the work.
This last effect is most obvious watching movies. I give weak passing grades to diverting films I couldn't care less about. If the movie gets just enough better that I start to care about what it might have been, that's when my harshest judgments are unleashed: I've entered into the punative "made me look" valley where I actually turn on the critical machinery--often to discover not entirely quickly enough that it was a false start. The subset of the movies that make me care and then reward the bother is where I start giving out decent scores.
Sometime when reading I turn the page, and go "ugh" inside and then feel the overwhelming urge to skip forward half a page or a whole page, or both pages. Then I go "how can you _know_ all this text is worthless in a tiny fraction of a second after the page flip?" So I go back and slog through it and sure enough, in the vast majority of cases, my instant assessment was right on the money.
Many of the long-winded essays linked from aldaily.com are particularly challenging in this regard. Some of those writers are talented enough to go on for page after page saying hardly anything at all, while defeating the immediate "this is vacuous crap" quick page-turn self defense. It appears that there is a high art to saying nothing in such an elaborate and convoluted way that busting the vacuity of the prose reduces me to my real-time reading speed.
I once read a piece, Kirkegaard I think, about chasing a bug around a desk with a pin while enduring immense boredom in the classroom. The humanities is where you learn to wield the pin, and make your reader perform as the bug. Not always, but fairly often. What to these people does the word "comprehend" actually mean?
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Interesting. I was under the impression that this is common sense.
Some people read by shape and thats why they can be provoked into a killing rage by bad typography, horrible fonts, and awful visual noise like shiny computer/PDA/tablet screens. It stresses them out, like how peering into a fog or concentrating on radio static can be fatiguing.
Some people read by sounding it out, and they are incapable of noticing bad typography, fonts are lost in the noise of phonics or whatever goes on in there, and visual noise is artsy and cute and to be encouraged.
I have wondered if
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> Just flashing my eyes across the screen shouldn't push enough bandwidth to actually OCR the page
I often have the experience that my eyes glance across some papers on a desk and I notice an interesting word or phrase is in there somewhere but I have no idea *which* paper it is on. I would have to read through everything looking for it.
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The fact that all but the slowest readers read by recognizing the pattern of the written word rather than sounding it out in their head has been known for decades. It's what led to the academic de-emphasis on phonics for learning reading. Unfortunately, the education experts didn't stop to consider that sounding out the word in your head over and over is how you *learn* to recognize it by sight.
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Oh well, this is Slashdot "news"...
(can I take that back? It IS old news, but OTOH it's a cool thing that kind of fits here)
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I fully agree - I notice this acutely at the moment, as I've been learning Russian for the past few months.
When I'm reading a book or an article, I skim over the common words, and slow down to sound out the unfamiliar ones. I noticed as my learning was progressing, that I would sometimes slow down to read every letter of a word in print, then realise it's actually a word I'm familiar with once I'd sounded it out in my head
Also, I noticed as I was becoming better at reading in Russian, that once I had starte
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"Interestingly, I am almost completely unable to read Russian transliterated in to Latin characters"
Even native speakers hate transliterated Russian. It's just ugly.
Seklild Rderaes (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yup. And I can raed taht etrine tnihg mselyf, brleay soinlwg dwon.
The funny thing is (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Wloud you lkie fires wtih taht?
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Re:Seklild Rderaes (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that the human mind can read it faster and more reliably when the letters are in the correct order. (And simply correct.)
Lazy and barely-literate types will mewl "o u new wut i ment", and it's true that a reasonably intelligent person can figure it out, but communication is easier and less stressful when everyone uses standard spelling. The fact that an experienced reader can go beyond deciphering individual phonemes and recognize the patterns is one part of that.
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A Spanish-speaker once asked me what "mocho" meant. I had no idea. I asked him for the context: "innit m8".
The way I see it, it's basic courtesy at least to try and write in complete words, instead of bashing out whatever 1337 lolspeak gibberish hits my fingertips just to save a few seconds - seconds that others will have to spend deciphering my drivel. A post here could be read by two million registered users; is my time really worth two million times as much as anyone else's? If it were, I wouldn't waste
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While I can read that just fine, that doesn't make it any less obnoxious when people do it thinking they are cute.
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I know I have
Context and capitals (Score:2)
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That's probably not what you were encountering.
We can understand misspellings and other small errors. You can even miss whole words, because we comprehend what we read by evaluating the context of it. The title "Skulled Riders" made no sense to me, because it had no context around it. Knowing what the post was saying allowed it to be clarified that it really said "Skilled Readers".
This is also why you can solve puzzles, like Wheel of Fortune type games, or cro
2nd Grade (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:2nd Grade (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand how they can latch onto the "sounding out" theory when there are so many examples of ancient cultures using hieroglyphs. There aren't any letters to sound-out in these ancient languages, yet the cultures that used them extensively didn't have problems understanding them.
Catching up with elementary school, what about catching up to the ancient Egyptians?
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Do you realize how long Chinese students spend memorizing characters and practicing their calligraphy?
I'm not so sure the catching up isn't going the other way.
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The research was there, but it was never solid enough to explain everything, so it was an accepted theory while they looked for something better.
Sounding out is, I believe, more of a teaching method, and one of those theories where if it works to teach it that way, that must be the way it works to learn. Kinda the same way the sun revolves around the earth, because that's the simplest explanation given what we knew.
Science is a gold digging slut, giving you what you want or need until something better come
Re:2nd Grade (Score:5, Informative)
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.
That teaching method was originally introduced in the 1960s as "Look Say". It was part of the general ideological overhaul of public education, of which the "New Math" was also a part. It all sprang from Russel et. al.'s philosophy of Behaviorism, which pointed away from man-the-rational and towards man-the-animal. Hence reading by memorization rather than by rational system (phonics).
Since then it has been discredited and so it had to change its name, I think it's called "Whole Language" now. It still competes with Phonics. This new research suggests the reason why Look Say is not the total failure that I and others predicted. However, it has a bit of difficulty explaining why (as others in this thread have pointed out) we can so easily read words whose internal letters are jumbled, so long as the first and last letters are correct.
I've kind of noticed this myself (Score:2)
We do both (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We do both (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually often skip even the fallback behavior. This happens especially often when I read novels that take place in foreign locations and the characters have names that I am not accustomed to reading. I read the book from cover to cover and then realize I have not the slightest clue what the main character is named. I recognize the overall shape of the name and the letter it starts with, but the rest is a jumbled mental mess, because I never took the time to read it and sound it out. For instance, while reading Crime and Punishment, to me, the main character's name was always R***********kov, and it would have been R********** if not for the character named R***********khin I had to tell him apart from.
Visual caching does not require re-parsing and sounding the word. You can just cache an unparsed blob. In general, I only bother parsing and sounding out a word if I expect to hear it, say it or write it later on. For this reason, when I read a name, a neologism or an unknown word that I can guess from the context, I rarely ever bother parsing it. Maybe it's just me, though.
Makes sense (Score:2)
Especially for non-character based writing like Chinese.
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Especially for non-character based writing like Chinese.
Saying it's a non-character based language doesn't seem to be the way you want to phrase it. Most kanji have a couple of main pronunciations which you can pretty consistently figure out. The big difference from the Latin writing system and the Chinese writing system is that chinese characters also have a meaning assigned to them. (And words tend to be more compact) You can still write out things fully phonetically in Chinese Characters. But with the Harry Potter books, the translators went to some lengths t
Sounding out is what I do... (Score:2)
...and why I am a fairly slow reader.
Interestingly, though, my fingers on a keyboard has become yet another form of brain-to-external-world communications. So words and meanings come out through patterns of movement in my fingers. I think "word" and the movements for "word" comes out in my fingers. The "sound" for "word" doesn't necessarily go through my brain unless I am thinking that way -- when I am more relaxed and less deliberate, words go directly from my brain to my finger movements.
Consequently,
Stupid Article is Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
It's already been well established that at least many people read this way.
Its common knowledge that most people can read normal (lower) case text faster than upper case text. And it has long been surmised that its due to the much better word shape diversity of lower case.
Its also common knowledge that most people can read jumbled up words with very little difficulty, as long as the first and last letters are correct, and the rest of the letters are in there in a random order.
Such as:
"I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae."
Given the number of people who can read the above almost effortlessly, anyone clinging to the theory that fast readers are "sounding words out" needs to be clubbed over the head with a baseball bat.
It also rebuts the premise of the article that we read by word shape. Its clearly a bit more complicated than that.
I expect we simultaneously look at word shape, the leading and closing letters, the length, and the middle letters along with some "predictive" matching based on context cues so we can narrow down likely candidate words that "fit" the sentence.
Re:Stupid Article is Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
What's important is that this is finally becoming established fact. Hooked on Phonics (and its sibling programs used the nation over for the past 20 years) produced a load of kids (in my generation specifically) who could barely read aloud at half their speaking pace. Phonics is an important skill for anyone who is literate but we have dedicated hundreds of hours of education time to it when at least some of that time should have been going to sight based reading. It isn't the difference between fast and slow readers, it's the difference between being able to read, and being able to read and comprehend while you do so.
Incidentally, your scrambled words example is a great way to show that word shape is very important, more important than just "the first and last letters". Look at the believe. Scrambled as it is in your example the word shape is identical (bvleiee) but if you scramble it in a way that moves the tall 'l' around it's much harder to read (beivele). The text that went around the internet that you are quoting from is very carefully constructed to be as easy to read as possible. actually becomes aulaclty, according becomes aocdcrnig. There are other tricks used also, making sure that the trickier to decode words have lots of context, preserving multi-letter characters, preserving important syllables, etc. It's a neat piece of brain hacking, but it isn't quite what it's made out to be.
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Incidentally, your scrambled words example is a great way to show that word shape is very important, more important than just "the first and last letters".
Oh I agree shape is very important, and yes, that text was careful to preserve shape.
But its clearly more than -just- shape, because if you preserve the shape but start replacing those inner letters with other similiarly shapped letters it breaks down.
Shape is just a filter used to narrow it down to candidate words. Inner letters flters it down further. O
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Man, if you're wxxxxxg, I don't want to hear about it.
Hmm. No wonder All-Caps is harder to read... (Score:3)
...and forces you to consider the matter more in depth. It breaks the normal shape of words and sentences.
Road signs (Score:5, Informative)
When the British decided to implement their current system of road direction signs, they switched from all-caps to mixed-case precisely for this reason: people remember the general shapes of words and the positioning of ascenders and descenders, thus people found it far easier to distinguish, say, "Brighton" than "BRIGHTON". This was many decades ago - how is this news?
People doing text layout have known this for years (Score:3)
For the exact same reason.
This is anything but a new theory. (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft, of all places, has a pretty good webpage on this. [microsoft.com]
Check out the "Model 1: Word Shape" section, in which this theory is described as "oldest model in the psychological literature, and is likely much older than the psychological literature"
There's some other interesting sections there too, like the moving window study.
I've do this...sometimes (Score:2)
I often read street signs at night, making out the word before the letters are truly readable, so obviously I'm not actually "reading" in the sense that I'm recognizing individual letters. But normally is sound out the individual words in my head. I'm a slow reader, and that is a hindrance in the computer industry (plus, I miss the enjoyment of reading a lot of books, because it just takes to long).
Could I read faster if I could somehow train myself to do this word recognition thing?
Anecdote time (Score:3)
I frequently don't have to read words directly because I can detect them through peripheral vision and context.
Perhaps related to this, I frequently get distracted while reading but keep going, understanding the meaning of the language but not becoming aware of the individual words.
30 seconds per page, what's the big deal? (Score:2)
it's called skim-reading. i read a 300-page novel in about 2 hours, but that's a leisurely pace, for me. i can do 3 lines at a time if i want, just read the first words, jump several and diagonally down, hit the end of the 3rd line, repeat. eyes spot paragraph beginnings and ends and focus on those: this is standard stuff if you've ever read tony buzan's books, what's the big deal? i don't recall - ever - my lips moving, or there being any "sounds" occurring in my bwwaiiiin. yes there's a sort-of delay
Re: (Score:3)
I'm an auditory person. I mentally "hear" every word as if someone is speaking. It happens more quickly than people are generally capable of speaking, but I still run the mental auditory pathway for every word. It's simply how I'm accustomed to processing written text, and how I remember that text most easily. Coincidentally, it also means that I often can't remember if read a piece of information or heard it in an audio file or video.
This is over simplistic... (Score:2)
There are multiple cognitive structures used in reading. There are all kinds of experiments where people can read perfectly well with letters removed from words and/or words with their letter order jumbled. This proves that word shape though probably necessary in speed reading is only one layer on many layers of cognitive infrastructure used in the process of reading as a whole.
Rebuts the theory? Not! (Score:2)
The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain 'sounds out' words each time we see them.
No, it most certainly DOES NOT rebut that theory, for two reasons:
(1) Homo sapiens is not a homogenous species; there are mutations - including neurological ones - and divergent evolutionary paths being explored with every single new birth; and
(2) I am living fucking proof that at least some humans have brains that do in fact sound out words, and quite literally so.
In order to communicate with a written language, I am forced to subvocalize - literally hear the words in my head - every bit of text that I rea
duh (Score:3)
We do go by pictures of the words instead of trying to read each letter of the word.
1. Something written using the words you know but different spelling?
dis iz nut sum tin hue kan reed faast bee coz you arr juss nut uzed to sea ying eet liek dat.
2. How about some capitalization to make things hard to read?
tHiS sEntEnCe iS gOiNg To bE hArdEr tO REaD bEcAuSe yOu cAN't rEcOGNiZE tHe wOrDS aS eAsILY.
3. how about some number replacements?
Y0U C4N R34D TH1S TEXT W1TH0UT TO0 MUCH PR0BL3M 8EC4USE 1T 1S L337-5P33K.
I think for general population, the first example is going to be hardest to read because the words make the familiar sounds but they're not in the right shape. If you go phonetically alone, that should have been easy read. I would think the third example is going to be easiest to read for most people, the words look familiar even though they clearly have numbers instead of some of the letters.
Re: (Score:3)
To mc, it's eccn mcre iccprcccve thct pccple ccn rccd scntccccs like this one, rccccctructing mcst of the lcst infcrmcticn withcct mcch effcrt.
Straw man. (Score:2)
I don't know that anyone has ever held a "theory that our brain 'sounds out' words each time we see them".
Forming my response (Score:2)
The study's authors are now busy memorizing the shape of the word "Duh."
Good job (Score:2)
Oprah had a guy on TV so long ago that I can't remember who said this very thing ... he was some super speed reader guy.
How do I get paid to 'research' things people already know? I'm jealous
This has been known for a long time (Score:3)
This result seems fairly obvious to anyone who has looked at typography. It explains a lot of the rules of thumb used in font design. For example, one of the characteristics of a legible font is that ascenders and descenders are neither too-long nor too-short. Character shapes that are too-expanded or too-condensed or just weird are bad, too. These characteristics probably screw up the shape too much. Same with line spacing. Too narrow makes it hard to see the word shape on either line easily.
Duh? (Score:3)
Z-order curve idea (Score:3)
I wonder if the logical conclusion of this is to format words/letters into a Hilbert or Z-order fractal curve like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve
This optimizes the locality of the words, and reduces our eye movement to a minimum. At least in theory...
This has been known since the 80s (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a faint inner voice in my head that speaks words as I read them, or write them. I would imagine that my speech circuitry would light up on a brain scan, but maybe not as strongly or extensively as when I'm listening or speaking.
I'm a fast reader, and I read upside down pretty fast too (comes in handy from time to time), so I don't think I'm compensating for a lack of visual processing.