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.

Comments

I love how

[FS1]

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.

Re:I love how

[dave420]

There are roughly 400 million people with English as their first language, true, but there are even more with English as a second language. If you're looking to select a language to base a study on, and you want it to be accessible, then you choose English. It really is that simple.

Also, Chinese is character-based, not letter-based, so the research would be completely different. Kind of like asking someone who's studying jet aircraft to study cars as more people have them.

So ...

[Pegasus]

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 ...

Focuses on 1 script, 1 language

[kahei]

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.

Re:Focuses on 1 script, 1 language

[hazem]

Everybody seems to be giving this guy a hard time because he did his research for reading only English. My guess is that the guy reads/speaks English and has ready access to people who do the same. This research is a good start and seems to have valuable results.

Now someone else can work on a PhD Thesis by taking his work and seeing if it applies in other languages.

Isn't this how science works? You do research, try to make some conclusions, and publish the results. If you wait to publish until you've found the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, then nobody publishes anything and science doesn't advance at all.

I'm not sure that he missed anything. He has started with what he knows and has resources to study.

Re:Focuses on 1 script, 1 language

[olau]

To pretend that these experiments apply to humanity in general rather than the author's own language/script choice is silly.

You know what is also silly? To pretend that this was the conclusion, although clearly the paper nowhere stated that it had found the grand unified theory of how people read. Here's a hint: when the paper talks about reading, it is obviously talking about reading English.

Yes, the paper would be even more interesting if it included studies of other scripts, and the failure to acknowledge the existence of other scripts should be criticised. But the rest of your criticism is unfounded.

Re:I'm not sure I buy it.

[maxwell demon]

Actuallythesplittingintowordsisnotnecessarytounder standwhatiswritteniftheorderoflettersiscorrect.Thi s"proves"thatyouarereadingbytheletter,notbytheword .(relyingonslashcodetoinsertameaninglessspaceevery nowandthen:-))

Re:REKANYZE!

[TarlCabbot]

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!

Re:I'm not sure I buy it.

[Orne]

I'm no linguist (elec eng w/ neural net studies), but I would argue that the ability to perceive concatenated sentences like that is a function of the ability of the brain/eye to focus on a particular range and filter out "distractions" (letters to the left and right). Padding our words with spaces helps the brain to quicker define the focus boundaries, after which we can process the text range for meaning...

I imagine the brain's focus as little perception boxes, scanning up and down the concatenated sentence until enough symbols are aligned to fire a recognition signal... As I read your post above, I find my eyes darting about a little more, actually darting to the center of the "word" once recognition is made.

runonsentencewithlowercase -- here's your letter by letter scan "mode"

runonsentencewithcoloring -- slightly easier to define word boundaries by color

runonSENTENCEwithuppercase -- it's easier to locate the word SENTENCE because we perceive a boundary beween small letters and upper letters.

runo nsente ncewit hbads pacing -- pain in the ass, but we still comprehend

run on sentence with lowercase -- whitespace speeds compehension.