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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?"
Personal observation and various readings in the topic make me pretty confident that context is critical for letter recognition. Whether that means words are recognized as "whole words" or not, the fact is, it very clearly is not a simple, straightforward bottom up "letters then phonemes then syllables then words" recognition process. Recognizing the letters is partly a feedback loop with the words and other parts, as demonstrated by experiments where parts of letters are blacked out. In a recognizable context (i.e. a word) they're still identifiable. Standing alone, they are not.
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I showed this type of paragraph to several of my Japanese co-workers, who are very good at English but not quite native level yet. They had an extremely difficult time making out the words and couldn't grasp the meaning of the whole paragraph at all.
A lot of reading comprehension comes from how you learned the language in the first place. Your ability to understand a given second language depends on how similar it is to your native language.
I think in this case its mostly a vocabulary problem. Native speakers know that "wlohe" and "raed" are not English words, and our minds can easily search for possible alternatives, but non-native speakers would need a dictionary to confirm that those aren't actually words they didn't know.
Yes, there are some cool examples. However, if a person jumbles up the letters of a word, knowing what the original word is, they may be subconscieously keeping a pattern which denotes the original word. This pattern is how we read. Changing the letters' order in a more mechanical way (as was done by the researchers at British Columbia) seems to produce less readable text.
What the research by Cambridge Uni may show is that it is not the exact ordering of letters that we recognise.
Anyone who is dyslexic would be able to tell them that for nothing!
I can read this sentence almost instantly and i am not english native, neither is my home language directly related to english language (Latin based). But on the other hand I read very easily english (although I write it with a lot errors).
I think this has partly to do with *how* you learnt english , but not whether it is your home language or not. (Heck I understand english humor perfectly like Discworld tongue-in-cheek humor whereas some Australian friend do not understand it). By "how" I mean how you read any word even in your own language !
Believe me or not I know I read by "grasping" what the phonem of a word are, and not necessaraly in a linear order. For example when i read a word which i do not know at all, I realize I read 1st phonem , then 3rd and 4th then 2nd etc... And not 1st , then 2nd, then 3rd. I also read book very quick with a full comprehension of what is written.
This seems to me to be pointing that "reading" might be far more complicated than most people describe it,might be education and cultural related, and depend on other factor. Such as training, whether you find pleasure in it or not, and (tadam) whether you learnt the language on your own without using somebody else method (as in my case with english : self taught).
It might be interressant to compare how people learn foreign language and then compare how they read *jumblewd* word out of those foreign language. it might give better conclusion than using native reader recognition of words.
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"(a typical psychology study uses 10 college students for its sample)."
Really? Are you talking a psychological study from an undergrads perspective, a graduate perspective or a postgraduate?
My department does a LOT of psychological study at Indiana University...unless the study actively involves college students, we don't seek them out. Heck, I don't remember last time I did a study with 10 folks in our PILOT group (i.e., to work out bugs in administration and otherwise), let alone a full study. Heck, we were a little pissed a few weeks ago as we were contracted to do a pilot study and work up the methods and all that crap...unfortunately we WANTED to get 200 folks just for that pilot...we only got 186. Thats 186 pieces of information that will ultimately be discarded before the REAL study with at LEAST 10x that amount goes public.
Heck, for the last master's thesis I was helping with (the kiddies ask for my help since I do this daily) 200 students was a small amount...yeah...the ultimate goal of that is to get it published, but its more of a "Look What We Found -- Give Us Some Money To Prove This Is *REALLY* What My Hypothesis Says".
I always have trouble with folks that aren't involved with a field for their willingness to draw sweeping conclusions from their tiny, and generally imaginary, homogenious life experience.
I agree, context is critically important in human pattern recognition. Context appears to constrain the possible choices at each junction of reasoning. To put this in context ;) imagine a short story: you enter a room, you turn on the light, you sit down in your chair. At the "you turn on the light" action, one of the possible branches in that story is not getting a drink from the water cooler. Your choices at that junction are limited by the context, or an analogy of "this leads to that".
Shh.
I don't think we really need to go any farther than Chinese to deduce that people recognize words from their shape more than from individual components of the shape.
Not that I've read the article or anything . . .
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