MS Psychologist on How We Read

RenderMonkey writes "In another follow-up to Can You Raed Tihs? Microsoft's Kevin Larson, a cognitive psychologist, dissected the main hypotheses on how we read at ATypI's Vancouver Typography conference. "Kevin supports the 'parallel letter recognition' model. People don't he says, recognise whole-word shapes. Instead the recognise each of the letter components and then make a series of best-guesses on the information returned to assemble, first, phonemes and then words." So what about the case of patterned re-ordering, aka the counter example to Can You Raed Tihs?"

Comments

Re:bah

[Angram]

I'm an undergrad interning in an eye-tracking lab. Suffice to say, I know a whole lot more about this than most people here. The fact is, it's going to take you a LOT longer to read the corrupt passages. All this effect illustrates is the capability of the human brain to unscramble words on-the-fly, using large amounts of context. The effect shows that that letter order is important. Heck, you could time yourself on a passage using your watch and note the difference. In eye-tracking research, word-level effect sizes are measured in milliseconds, and this exercise will probably give you a difference in seconds (that's preposterously massive).

Re:What the hell?

[The Cydonian]

They also have a linguist on board. Had the oppurtunity to interact with her some time back, and I must say, I was impressed by the quality of work being done by her team.

Jokes about software quality aside, Microsoft hires some very interesting people.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's an offtopic joke. The original poster needed to keep the first and last letters the same. He moved the last letters of the words, and "fag0t" is just 3l33t sp34k, and has nothing to do with the article.

Either -1 Offtopic or +1 Funny (stretching it) would have been an appropriate moderation.