Slashdot Mirror
The Science of Word Recognition
neile writes "I stumbled across a fascinating paper over at the Microsoft Typography site today that provides a really nice overview of the different theories on how humans read. If you thought we read by recognizing word shapes, think again! With the assistance of fancy eye-tracking cameras researchers have been able to devise several clever experiments to give us new insight into how reading works." We've linked to some of Larson's work previously.
Did I just read what I think I read? (Pun intended)
It will happen.
Would one of those stupid comments about the colour scheme on /. be on-topic now?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I was reading what was written on her T-shirt!
So are Microsoft going to patent the way we read and then sue?
"If you are reading this then you owe Microsoft royalies"
----
when i see that microsoft page, my eyes start to hurt, because i can hardly read the navigation!
or do you think that super-small renerding on firefox is intended by them?
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
Anyone else too lazy to read the entire thing? Also, I'm curious as to dyslexia.
To make it more obvious, stick a tall letter in a word that only has short letters and you'll come away thinking word shape does matter.
(or did he explain it... there were way to many words and way too few glossy pictures in that article for me to comprehend it)
New technology will soon be revealed that will instruct Slashdot users on the proper spelling of "lose".
The USSGN (Union of Slashdot Spelling and Grammar Nazis) is expected to stage protests against the new product in the interest of keeping their jobs.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
With the assistance of fancy eye-tracking cameras researchers have been able to devise several clever experiments to give us new insight into how reading works."
Oh they must have been using EyeQ....
I can read at 44692 words per minute! Thanks for posting that long article for me to read, I needed the exercise.
And thank you EyeQ! Your the greatest!
Really though, they say that the more letters/words mean faster reading times. It's true. Think about a book or article you've read. When the words are together on the page it's easier to read because your eyes can jump around letting your brain fill in the blanks.
Ever read something that made sense but you couldn't quote it word for word? It's likely because you read in this same way.
Get your Unix fortune now!
"Evidence from the last 20 years of work in cognitive psychology indicates that we use the letters within a word to recognize a word."
Man, I'm so glad they finally figured this out...
Does anyone else think that merely analyzing how english is read is very closed minded? I'm pretty sure only a very small percentage of the world speaks and reads english.
I would love to see a study comparing how english is read to how chinese is read by native speakers. Very interesting i would gather.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
The creators of Word giving advice on typography. Do they have no sense of irony?
Right, because we have the "Increase Text Size" option in firefox for shits and giggles. Use it, instead of complaining about font size without considering browser differences, resolution differences, installed font differences, and firefox features.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
While reading the article, I suddenly become hyper-aware about how I was reading the article. :-)
Don't let the Microsoft name scare you off - the article makes for a fascinating look (pun intended) into how we read. I wonder, though, if these findings are duplicated with written Oriental languages.
You call this a signature?
Since most people in the world don't use the latin alphabet, it would be interesting to find out how word recognition works for them. And how they read words in our alphabet.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
The final conclusions are similar to what I learned in my college linguistics classes 15 years ago. Language contains a lot of redundancy. The reason is that we often encounter situations of so-called "reduced redundancy". For example, someone might have sloppy handwriting so you can't make out all of the letters. Or you might be talking to someone while they brush their teeth. If language were highly optimized, we wouldn't understand a thing in these situations, but because of redundancy we can usually communicate very effectively.
The same applies to reading. The conclusions of the paper seem trivial to me. Of course, reading exploits "visual" and "contextual" information. How else would be understand a sentence like "The boy ate a ham___er" (with a few letters obscured)?
The fact that the brain's neural net adds up the weighted lexicographic, syntactic, semantic (and even pragmatic) information available to it in order to interpret language should be familiar to anyone who's read Goedel, Escher, Bach. And that was published in 1979...
Peer Pressure
When Slashcode starts spell-checking we may be able to retire, but until then the rate at which people are instructed in the difference between "lose" and "loose" is probably less than the rate at which people join /. and greater than the rate at which people improve their spelling.
I can just imagine the Microsoft testing labs...
Hree is an epamxle of jsut taht, it's qitue esay to raed, ins't it? Agulohth it can get plluartraicy hrad wtih the lgnoer wdros.
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
when are they going to repeat these experiments in let say China or Japan? I'm *very* interested in what would the conclusions be there. ...
For what i know abaout japanese, they don't use spaces between 'words'. A single kanji represents the whole word and their outline is always more or less square. So the whole bouma theory fails here, as he finds out.
I'm sure they could leard more interesting things in other writing sysmtems
My native language is not English. Since the very early days of English learning, I've noticed there are certain vague character combinations: (1) rn vs. m; (2) l vs. 1.
Research shows that
I found myself becoming aware of how I read while I read. Fun! I agree with the author regarding letter recognition. The parallel aspect of word recognition is very interesting as well because it begins to explain why we are albe ot raed srcambled txet os eaisly!
Also, more work needs to be done to consider the visual cues outside the focus of attention. It is here that, I believe, shape and form cue the reader, more than letter shapes do, as to the potential content of the text to come. (Exactly how is for the geniuses.)
Blogging because I can...
Read it, it's interesting. It does get a wee bit weird when it's describing how you read as you read... a sort of super-conciousness about my eye movements. It's like when you become aware of your breathing or something and then have to conciously pay attention to it for a while to make sure it doesn't stop!
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
While some of the results here are interesting (but old), the fact that the entire study focuses on exactly 1 script and 1 language basically renders the conclusions worthless (as conclusions about cognition in general... I suppose they still have value as conclusions about English and the Latin script).
What has happened here is:
1 -- Observe people reading a given language/script
2 -- See how they make use of features of that particular language/script, such as tall letters, case, and the occurrence of 'skippable' words such as articles
3 -- Describe the way they use these local features, and call that a theory of reading in general.
I don't really understand how to apply a theory of reading based on word and letter shapes when there are so many people reading text in which:
--There are no letter boundaries, and/or
--There are no word boundaries, and/or
--Letters all have the same form factor
The experiments described would probably generalize very well to arabic and greek scripts, pretty well to cyrillic (no tall/short letters to speak of), badly to devanagari-type scripts, very badly to Chinese and Japanese, and not at all to hieroglyphics (though I agree that there may never have been a reader of hieroglyphics who was fluent by modern standards).
To pretend that these experiments apply to humanity in general rather than the author's own language/script choice is silly. It's an interesting article and I'm glad the research was done but unfortunately a certain failure to 'get' the multilingual nature of humanity, which I don't really expect to find in MS work, is in evidence here.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Although it is nice to see mentioning of my trade a /., this paper has about the status of a student's essay. It doesn't even mention literature after 1998!
You just need to be a bit more lose about it all. There's no need to loose the rag!
(Actually, I don't know HOW anyone can be content with the misspellings. But then, I don't see how Americanese holds water either.)
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
AND READ WHAT I HAVE TO SAY... if I had anything to say that is... but now we have another reason to yell at the ones who write in all-caps
If there's one real take-home lesson of brain-design from cognitive science, it's that the brain tends to do everything several different ways in parallel, and then use the results from all of them.
Obviously it can't all be shape, there are plenty of words with identical shapes and yet these are distinguishable.
But it could certainly be true that we use shape and parallel letter recognition at the same time. Shape narrows the field of possibilities from millions to a small handful, and then parallel recognition chooses one of the options.
Whatever happens, you can be sure it's terribly complicated, extremely robust and very efficient.
They seem to have forgotten that you can recognise a lot of words wtih the letters out of order as long as the first and last letters are in the right spot. in fact there was a slashdot article on it a while ago.
...I got nothing.
From the article: ...lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text.
This could also explain why nobody likes to read email where the other person uses all caps.
Why is this the first image that popped into my head?
I couldn't read the patent, your honor. Or the S&D order... Or the summons... Or the directions to the courthouse...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I'm surprised this guy is actually working with ClearType. That is just a simple way of making characters appear better by using sub-pixels to increase character resolution. I would think this type of work would be better applied in optical character recognition, maybe even with cursive handwriting.
The FArticle does, in fact, address this, though not directly - it puts forth a theory that all letters in a word are absorbed simultaneously, and the brain re-orders them. This is given as theory #3, admittedly a ways down.
This gets me thinking, though, about the importance of context. If you drew the letters PLEORBM in a Scrabble game, it might take a while to see the word staring at you. But in the context of a (mangled) sentence: "you can sitll raed tish wouthit a pleorbm," it much more easily jumps out. Interesting.
Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go unspoken when they get older.
Absolutely. And adults can "relearn" those distinctions, too; I found that as my Japanese studies progressed (started at 19, pretty close to native now) the range of things I was able to think about expanded considerably--so much so that now I sometimes have trouble speaking to people in English because English doesn't have a word for the concept I'm thinking about.
If there's those that have shied away from Microsoft, well because they're Microsoft, you might not be aware of http://research.microsoft.com which regardless of which side of various fences you might sit has some very interesting material and is generally worth tracking over time.
Aplogise for the tangent, on the back of this article seemed an apt place to point to the MS research site for those that might not of been aware of it.
There's a torrent for eyeQ at suprnova.org for those who don't mind pirated software.
Does this mean I cna turn off my spell cheker?
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
no, not really. It seems very reasonable considering that english is most likely the native language of the researchers. Research is hard enough without introducing extra complexity through using a foreign language and then having to find subjects that are fluent in that language.
You can't study everything at the same time. Quit complaining for the sake of complaining... sheeesh.
--
Simon
how ironic...
an article about reading posted on slashdot
The internal representations for these models convert the letter information to phonemic information, which is seen as a mandatory step for word recognition. It is well known that words that have a consistent spelling to sound correspondence such as mint, tint, and hint are recognized faster than words that have an inconsistent spelling to sound correspondence such as pint
I can not believe this is in a serious paper. Mandatory? Please. What about people born deaf? Are they all unable to read?
From TFA:
Eye movement studies that I will discuss shortly indicate that there are three zones of visual identification. Readers collect information from all three zones during the span of a fixation. Closest to the fixation point is where word recognition takes place. This zone is usually large enough to capture the word being fixated, and often includes smaller function words directly to the right of the fixated word. The next zone extends a few letters past the word recognition zone, and readers gather preliminary information about the next letters in this zone. The final zone extends out to 15 letters past the fixation point. Information gathered out this far is used to identify the length of upcoming words and to identify the best location for the next fixation point
That's a shame, it wasn't redundant when I started writing it :)
I'm wondering about the competence level of the readers used in the various tests. People have, in my experience, a wide range of reading ability levels ranging from those who still have to "spell out" many words letter by letter up to speed readers who can read entire phrases (or even whole sentences) as easily as most people read single words. If we divide them into three groups (phonetic readers, whole word readers, and "cognitive chunkers"), would these results be consistent from group to group?
:)
Learning to read, like learning higher math, is a process of internalizing certain reflexes. Most people alive today do not understand calculus. Most will also never learn to read much faster than they can speak aloud.
Ultimately, 80% of the people voting in the next presidential election are of average or lower intelligence.
The rest of us are Slashdot members.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Hahaha, you brought up clippy. I don't know what's funnier, the stupid paperclip, or desperate nerds rehashing the same old jokes in vain attempts to get laughs..
Windows sux. Am I cool now?
As a non-native (but fluent) speaker of English, and the husband of a fluent English speaker learning Danish, I can tell you quite well that there are many concepts that have a single word describing them in Danish but not in English, and vice-versa. Some words are normally considered equivalent but have slightly different extents ("pink" covers more colors than the common translation "lyserød", for instance).
The grandparent also didn't say "couldn't be expressed", but "has no word". Given enough verbiage, you can (probably) express any word in one language in any other language, but that's not what you want to do in conversation.
And if the "language of Shakespeare" is so all-encompassing, why has English since then been stealing words from other languages like a slum rat during a riot in a shopping mall? Mind you, I think this is a good feature that adds expressiveness to the language, but it clearly shows that there are things that English speakers consider important enough to be able to express succinctly that they'll bring in foreign words for it.
-Lars
Anonymous idiot.
---
I'm surprised this guy is actually working with ClearType.
Just a comment about ClearType...
I've been using it for the last 2 months or so, since I got a new LCD monitor and I must say that I've noticed that I'm suffering a lot less eye-strain since I switched...
It was a little weird for the first couple of days, but now I don't even notice the difference...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Here's a reading excercise for you - all letters that are longer than 3 letters have been "internally scrambled" meaning that first and last letter are kept in position and all other letters are randomly placed within the word. Sounds like it would be impossible to read? You be the judge... The text was taken from the article Why I wtroe this peapr
I am a psloigycshot who has been wokirng for Msoiforct in defnfiert ciceaipats scine 1996. In 2000 I cmelpoted my PhD in ctnogiive pchygosloy form the Uiisvretny of Teaxs at Atisun sinytdug word rntogiiocen and rndaeig aiiuiqcostn. I jeiond the CTlreyape team in 2002 to hlep get a beettr sictenfiic usdrnanidtneg of the betnifes of CeyraTlpe and oehtr reidnag toegchoelnis with the goal of aicnivehg a great on-sercen rdieang eenpcixree.
Duirng my fsrit year wtih the taem I gvae a seiers of tklas on reanvlet pogyichcosall tciops, smoe of which iitgnaestd srnotg deemenisgrat. At the crux of the dnaesiegmret was that the taem bvieeled taht we reezocignd wodrs by lokiong at the olinute that goes aorund a wlhoe wrod, wlihe I bleeievd taht we renczogie iidivandul lttrees. In my yonug caeerr as a rineadg plisgschooyt I had neevr eecuroenntd a mdoel of raiedng taht used wrod sphae as pcetupreal uints, and kenw of no poslghycoitss who were wionrkg on such a meodl. But it turns out that the moedl had a vrey long hotsriy taht I was uilfmaanir wtih.
While the study is certainly about reading English texts, could one draw some conclusions about the readability of source code? I guess at least the finding that whitespace governs the jumps of our eyes might have some relevance here.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I once read somewhere that words can be compared to radio waves: vowels are the carrier wave while the consonants represent the actual information. That's why you could leave out the vowels in many (written) words and still undertand what is meant.
Something else (from the article): The serial letter recognition model fails because it cannot explain the Word Superiority Effect. The Word Superiority Effect showed that readers are better able to identify letters in the context of a word than in isolation [...]
has anyone heard of this "isolation" word processor?
Of course he describes all the models before he concludes that from the three models, Word Shape Recognition (oldest), Serial Letter Recognition and Parallel Letter Recognition (newest), the latter is the one that is today the most accepted model.
In my opinion, the main conclusion which can be drawn from this research is that the brain is a discrete temporal signal processing machine. During eye saccades, signals are sent to the brain in a certain order. The brain cannot recognize anything unless the generated sensory signals arrive in an order which has already been learned from experience.
It is known that our vision becomnes severely impaired if the eye is prevented from moving. We are not much different than frogs and lizards in this regard. Temporal order expectation is the key aspect of recognition. This is true for all sorts of sensory modalities, not just for visual stimuli.
I am somewhat fluent in Chinese. Though syllables in Chinese (and Korean) approximately fit into squares, they share two characteristics with alphabetic word shapes:
First, Chinese characters are often composed of several smaller characters, 500 or so, instead of the 70'ish letters and numerals (including capitals) in English. We say such a character may have a "moon" sub-character on the left, a "white" on the right and so on. The sub-characters can be partial clues to meaning and pronunciation (e.g. a left moon usually signifies part of a body, and the a right moon means its sounds like "bai"), but there are no steadfast rules. Just like in English where the pronunciation can vary from the spelling, and the whole meaning vary from those of the prefix and root. But Chinese breaks the rules more often, probably since many of the characters have been around 3000 years- seven times longer than modern English spelling rules. The Korean writing system is totally planned and recent, so it is very logical. The sub-characters represent the beginning, vowel, and end of a syllable, gracefully packed into a square.
Second, you can trace the boundaries of Chinese characters too and see distinguishing characteristics. They might have a gap in one corner, a ragged stroke defining an edge, etc. Just like in English words a learner will move from observing the strokes and sub-characters into the gestalt of the whole character. Just like any other language, chinese characters are contextual. Combinations are sematically constrained to one to four syllable word. And they are grammatically constrained to expect nouns, verbs, modifiers, etc, in certain sequences.
I am sure that we've seen this e-mail floating around. Doesn't it seem like we read in shapes?
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!
It makes a big difference if your messed up words use common letter patterns (what, in the article he called 'Psuedowords'), or not.
Example:
'uesdnatnrd' wasn't to hard to recognize beacuase 'uesd' and 'tnrd' aren't letter patterns that exist in real words. So the mind works quicker to rearrange the letters to find a real word.
'aulaclty' was much harder because it's almost pronouncable. 'lac' and 'lty' are common patterns from real words, and 'aul' might not be common but it's pronouncable.
Just an observation.
Aw crap, ninjas!
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at
Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod
are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the
rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit
a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought
slpeling was ipmorantt!
They conclude that 'word shape ... might be satisfactorily described in terms of the letters in their positions.'
What a conclusion !!
Which letters appear and the order that they appear in seams to have a bearing upon word recognition. Who would have guessed ?
h|_|H? 1 hA\/3 |\|0 pR0b13Mz r33D1|\|G t3Xt 1|\| aLt3r|\|At1Ng k4S3! Th1z j|_|sT m33|\|z th3 r3S34rch3rz suX0r & r n0T 31337!
I've never read so self-conciously before.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
I notice MS Research doing lots of basic research that has never been productized. Its rare to see corporations being so liberal with their resources. Even Google's very imaginative projects seem to be directed towards a commercial goal.
This suggests an interesting contradiction in MS product strategy. MS has a long history of "clone and conquer", e.g. Excel copies off VisiCalc and Lotus 123. Just this week MS cloned Apple iTunes. Yet MS Research is conducting some very interesting basic research. Go figure!
Pretentious? Special? Come on, it's the most ordinary thing!
Here in Europe, practically everyone knows at least two languages, some know three or more -- if not fluently, at least stumblingly. Practically everyone here has had the experience that achurch describes -- at least to some extent, depending on fluency in different languages. There's nothing special about this experience, nothing unusual, certainly nothing to be pretentious about. It's just a very, very ordinary fact of life.
It is, however, very unfortunate that so many Americans (and some others) are monolingual, and therefore limited in cultural experience and scope of thought. Especially considering that the US is the only superpower! Because of this superpower role I really, really wish Americans had a broader outlook on the world.
Don't be insecure about this, it's such a mundane thing. Instead of decrying it, learn a language, broaden your outlook! It can really be a very rewarding experience. Here's an unusually easy language with an unusually broad cultural scope that you might try.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Not having read the original papers it is difficult to be certain, but the way the results were presented seem to be the wrong way around to me.
What they seemed to be doing was to prove that, for example, Word Shape was the way that reading recognition worked. What they didn't seem to be doing was to advance the hypothesis and trying to test it and disprove it.
"There are no sciences like Sociology" - That Hideous Strength
I notice that a lot of people in this thread have mentioned the ease with which scrambled words can be read.
I'm a native English-speaker (not that you'd always notice, grammatically speaking) who also speaks a bit of German, so when I read some of these scrambled paragraphs, I occasionally spot what resembles a German word. I'm curious as to how being multilingual affects one's reading style, especially as it applies to these scrambled words.
Anyone know of any research on the subject or have any thoughts/comments?
Following a day's sessions on legibility and word recognition, the Thessaloniki conference held a round table on legibility and the processes of word recognition, chaired by John Hudson and participants Mary Dyson, Hrant Papazian, Kevin Larson and Peter Enneson.
you had me at #!
no, because you play the game wrong.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yahoo news is running an AP story about the difference between dislexia in English and Chinese. It's definitely worth a read.
In Soviet Russia, the words recognize you! (groan...there goes my karma then)
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
Just like a small bite of pizza gets to your stomach faster than a large bite.
;-)
Interestingly it is also possible to do the reverse and just replace the letters at the fixation point with the letter x, but this is very frustrating to the reader.
Did anybody else feel like they wanted to get a copy of this program and set up an eye tracking camera on their computer? Maybe I took my evil pill this morning.
Researchers were surprised to discover that their sophisitcated eye-tracking software discovered, in verified and repeatable experiments, that Hebrew and Arabic readers had much poorer memories - having eye movements that proceded in a retrograde fashion at a 5-1 ratio over eye movements that proceded forward.
Respectfully, David Tallan
I do not know your particular background, and surely there are concepts in different languages/cultures that are not present in others, but I have found that most times that someone can't figure out how to express X concept "because english doesn't have a word for the concept", it is usually due to lack of knowledge of english vocabulary, not lack of the word in the english language (which, I believe is a result of cultural and educational trend...well, in America at least. I admit to having a much smaller vocabulary than I would like.)
Did you buy a Neuros today?
Don't give any ideas to spammers on how to sneak their "pneis elnraegemnt ceram" past the filters. I do suspect that the effect is local to the small group of letters and long words that are totally randomized will be difficult to read.
This paper doesn't even talk about languages besides English. Assuming that their experiments describe all humans is little presumptious, don't you think?
Too bad the article forces a wide column, rather than an easier-to-read narrow column.
The approprately clunky sounding phrase to express the thought related in your second sentence is "concatenative assemblage".
Furry cows moo and decompress.
One problem with deciding "word shape" vs. "letters" as the method a reader uses to recognize a word comes from treatment of the reader as "atomic". I am a proficient reader. When I read a word, whether written by another, or by myself (as I type), I have multiple subcurrents of consciousness. A typo in a word might leave me with recognition of the word, and a sense that "something's wrong", simultaneously - it sometimes takes me several seconds to detect the typo, especially if it's one I often make myself. Likewise, some spelling mistakes derive from the difference my spoken accent makes with the written conjugated spelling, most often in the case of syllables separated by an "e" that is pronounced as a "schwa", easily confused with some pronunciations of "i" or "a", and sometimes "y".
Reading words silently, I sometimes notice an inner chorus pronouncing the words, with one or two discordant notes, even from poorly organized structure or unparseable punctuation. Deciding how people recognize words must also account for how people's minds are organized. The myth of the "undivided self" gets in the way of understanding not only how complex we are "under the hood", where media is digested, but denies credit to our grand integrator, which juggles these partial selves into one face with which to confront the world. As machine intelligence benefits from multiple simultaneous processing, why should they have all the fun? As we mimic our own minds in computer simulations, why should we have all the fun?
--
make install -not war
If there's a paperclip on the display, I recognise it's Word.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
well that's just plain misleading!, I read through the whole article and not even 1 desert island joke, or any jokes about smoking dinosaurs?!
the link should have read: "We've linked to some of [NOT GARY] Larson's work previously."
I think ms (lower-casing/deprecation intentional/perpetual) is positioning itself to be known as:
/ 14 44254&tid=198&tid=109&tid=155&tid= 17
"The Word"
or something like that...
Scary...Dangerous stuff...
something needs to be done about that. Especially since they're roping Sony and others into the proprietary blue-ray. (If the intent is to make it impossible to have Linux/Open Source users legally buy and legally integrate BR-based DVD devices, then...)
See yesterday's:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/01
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Anyone else notice all the misspellings in the paper? I thought it was kinda funny that he had a misspelling in the section that was talking about recognizing misspellings!
Or is this some sort of trick? Does the end of the paper say "By the way, there are 12 errors on this page. Did you notice them?"
I'm wondering if OSS can use this research to improve readability, by having a scoring function in our wordprocessors?
"A while ago I was emailed something that stuck out from the usual chain/joke/... flood. "
I'm wondering if this research could be used to create better spam? Gets by the filters, and gets its message across.
"This suggests an interesting contradiction in MS product strategy. MS has a long history of "clone and conquer", e.g. Excel copies off VisiCalc and Lotus 123. Just this week MS cloned Apple iTunes. Yet MS Research is conducting some very interesting basic research. Go figure!"
How's that any different than what happen at Xerox PARC?
I read really fast. I also read quite a bit of fantasy and science fiction. I have noticed the effect that weird alien and fantasy names (N'kalogh or Xyztle) are like driving over speedbumps. The higher the density of unfamiliar and nearly unpronounceable names, the more likely I am not to finish the book (or even pick it up).
"N'kalogh leapt onto his mighty huyloch and rode across the plains of V'looth'u". Next please.
This paper gives a convincing pyschological model about why this occurs and it is pretty much what I had surmised on my own.
So, from now on, please name all of your aliens Bob, Larry, Bubba, or Charles.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Actually, a closely releated study was published today in Nature saying "that a different area of the brain is affected in dyslexic Chinese children who read the character-based language than in Western youngsters who use an alphabet language."
More information in this Globe and Mail article and from Nature itself.
I find I actually read those faster because I don't bother to "think" the word, I just associate it with a concept and skip over it. Oddly enough taking the time to figure out how to pronouce it often slows me down again.
No, i--s n-t e----h t--t t-e f---t a-d l--t l-----s a-e in p---e: t-e o----s m--t be p-----t, t-o.
- OR -
No, it's not enough that the first and last letters are in place: the others must be present, too.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Of people who read and write, more people use the Latin alphabet than any other alphabet.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
All mammal perceptions BEGIN with anticipation.
It is LITERALLY true that your needs and wants shape what you are looking for (anticipating) and THAT influences what you will perceive.
We see what we want to see
I too have noticed this. I read very fast and also read alot of scifi/fantasy. What I have found is that in books with the rediculous N'gler'th type names I find myself substituting a pronunciation that may have nothing to do with the actual name spelled by the author. Ex. Nerth for the above name. I only realized I did this when I have spoken to someone else about a particular charachter in a book and when I say "well, I like the part where Nerth split the atom" or some such, the other person has NO idea who the heck I am talking about except by context, because THEY seem to have come up with their own idea of how to pronounce the un-pronouncable names. Doesnt effect my reading of the book, but it is an interesting observation.
they pattern match.
Read JWZ's "scrmable" description:
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/marginal.html
this
[biggest]
THE FUNNIEST THING
About this Shirt Is That
by the time you realize it doesn't say anything
its too late to stop reading it
you dumb fuck
[smallest]
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
Maybe I am not normal (likely, since I read /.), but I just don't read like that. I look at a line and just know what it says, and if there are difficult concepts in it, or a word I don't know, my eyes instantly zoom in on it. When I read a novel, I might as well be watching a movie, as I hardly even see words. So while their study may have shown the norm, it wasn't all-inclusive. My reading follows none of the patterns they indicated.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
Because of this superpower role I really, really wish Americans had a broader outlook on the world. ... hell with it). ... now it does look a bit offtopic ...
Well, probably it was this lack of broader outlook that has made them the superpower. (Damn! I cannot think of an analogy other than Hitler, and that wd make my submission
If you have a broader outlook, you will not go about imposing your hegemony everywhere (as you tend to respect the differences etc.), and thus, you wont be a superpower. (An economic superpower? similar arguments apply to influencing other peoples' economies).
hmm
I was kind of annoyed at the number of times the article & research it referenced used the success rates of editing errors as a way to prove/disprove the theories. When you read something, it is very different than when you're editing it. If you're reading something you're just trying to learn what it says and process the information. Typically you do it as fast as possible unless it is very important. On the other hand, if you're editing, your purpose is to find errors. You do this at a much slower speed. I'd find it very hard to believe that our brain works in all that similary of ways for the two different tasks.
Vote Quimby.
That said, my reading is far, far better than my speaking...
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg.
.
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!
Get a free iPod. Here is how it works
Once again the readers of Slashdot take a single paper/review and then generalize to an entire field of research. For a technical group the simple rule of not generalizing from a single instance still has not been learned.
+++ You are in a maze of fiddly little toolbar buttons, all alike. +++
Yep, that's word all right.
This can't be true, that thought comes before language. Y'all need a language first so I can tell y'all what to think!
"Subjects are more successful at naming letters to the right of fixation than to the left of fixation."
I wonder if this is based on whether you are left or right handed?
I'll admit that I've had precious few chances to speak English during my five years in Japan, which has probably not had a salutory effect on my ability to recall vocabulary during conversation. However, I'm not suggesting that it's not possible to express such concepts in English, just that to do so would require more effort than I (or the speaker in question) want to put into the conversation. To borrow the Korean example from above, the distinction between loosely-fitting and tightly-fitting cylinders can certainly be made in English--else it couldn't have been explained in the first place!--but if someone asks you "does it fit?", for example, do you want to go to the effort of saying "it fits but it's tight" or "it fits and it's loose", or just answer "it fits"? While perhaps not the best example, that's the kind of "trouble" I was referring to: when you have a concept you want to express but the target language doesn't have a simple way to express it.
This really screws with the recognition paradigm presented - if we screen on word masks (fork: fort, work, fuck, fork) then how can these reordered-letter words be so easy to read?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
I've also heard added that it sometimes comes away with the pocket lint.
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
(I learned Japanese a long time ago; so long that I have forgotten much of it except for emergencies and occasional flashes of memory. Hopefully this will stimulate one of them.)
It would be quite interesting to know how many other languages have words for concepts that are unique to that language, and how many words are shared between a few languages but not common to most. It would probably say a fair bit about the differences in culture.
I wonder if Esperanto tries to add new words for concepts that come up in other languages?
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
The large number of pronouns ("I"=watakushi/watashi/boku/ore/jibun/..., "you"=anata/kimi/omae/sochira/...) is pretty commonly mentioned, but one example that comes to mind particularly is "ganbatte" (informal imperative of ganbaru, "to try hard", "to make an effort"). This is widely used in Japan as an exclamation of encouragement, but there's no direct English equivalent. The closest I've come are "good luck" or "keep on keepin' on", but both of those are only applicable in limited circumstances, whereas ganbatte is used much more widely. An American friend of mine who does translation here once called it the "universal panacea", which is as good a description as I've heard. When my parents were visiting Japan last summer--my mother with a bad ankle--we were climbing a long stairway at Toushouguu (Nikkou), and a Japanese lady coming down saw us and said to my mother, "Ganbatte!" I fumbled for words to explain it for about half a minute, and when the meaning finally got across we all had a good laugh--it's something of a running joke in the family now. (:
In his little "example" the letters are present, just jumbled. So, what you are saying is true, but has no bearing on grandparent's statement.
That's right. All your base.
I think that was translated to me as 'keep your chin up'. That's only a vague memory, though, so I might be wrong. It doesn't seem to quite cover the concept, does it?
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
That's one I hadn't heard before, but no, it doesn't cover the entire range, either. It's something of a mix of that, "good luck", and "you can do it", with a dash of "I'm counting on you" thrown in for good measure.
The original study -and this poster- claimed that only the first and last letters had to be in place for the word to be legible, which wasn't quite accurate: the other letters must also be present.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Does anyone else find it as difficult to read an article about how we read as I do? Like trying to describe how you walk.
I got another batch today. I sent out invitations to everyone in this thread by now, except you. Ask and you shall receive.
May I have one please?
gentlewhisper at internode.on.net?
Thank you very much!
I'll never cease to be amazed by the stupidity of psychologists. The word superiority effect occurs because we recognize the word (through whatever means) first. When later asked if a particular letter appeared, we don't *recall* the answer from memory, we *derive* the answer from our knowledge of the spelling of the word. In other words, if I see the phrase "dumbass shrink" flashed before me and then a nitwit asks "did you see the letter k?", I my brain doesn't remember seeing the letter k at all. Instead I think "I saw 'dumbass shrink'. That's spelled d-u-m-b-a-s-s-s-h-r-i-n-k, and yes, there's a 'k' in there." So word superiority only shows that we can quickly recognize words. It doesn't tell us anything AT ALL about how.
IIRC people who read left to right also scan left to right. In other words, if look across a valley your eyes will work from left to right across the scene. For grins try to look at some scenery from right to left sometime. :)
That make a lot of sense. Also, I didn't want to focus only on your case, since I don't know anything about it. I was just making a general observation about something that I see happening freqently. I suppose I went off topic some. My bad.
Did you buy a Neuros today?
Show me a language with letters, and I'll show you a language with letter boundaries. They just may not be the kind *you* were thinking of.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.