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.