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Method of Reading Discovered
Scientists have discovered that the method our eyes use to process letters on a page is different than previously believed. Instead of assimilating one letter at a time our eyes actually lock on to two different letters simultaneously about half the time. "The team's results demonstrated that both eyes lock on to the same letter 53% of the time; for 39% of the time they see different letters with uncrossed eyes; and for 8% of the time the eyes are crossing to focus on different letters. A follow-up experiment with the eye-tracking equipment showed that we only see one clear image when reading because our brain fuses the different images from our eyes together."
If yuo corss yuor eeys smoetemis, you sohlud be albe to raed tihs qitue eailsy. I terid it, and it mdae all the sepllnig msitaeks on salsdhot go aawy. Hvewoer, it ddi not ipormve Sttucle Mkoney's eitding.
Since I've already patented a method to use our eyes use to process letters on a page, I'll be heading down to Texas to hash it out with the lawyers...
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl 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.
In other words, this study was flawed in the first place. Our eyes don't look at individual letters, they look at groups at a time. I learned this in high school....
I don't ever remember starting to idenitify whole words one letter at a time anyway...
from
"lock on to two different letters simultaneously about half the time."
...half the time, every time.
I could have sworn we knew this was where dyslexic came from, that you see two letters that don't end up in the right order in your head.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
That's pretty cool, but what about non-alphabetic systems, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean? Does the physical act of reading depend at all on the unit of meaning we are scanning with our eyes? Not that the researchers should have done this in the same experiment, they're in England, so it makes sense for them to stick to the native language.
I assume they're doing the study using the latin alphabet. It would be interesting to see if the process changes at all using a symbolic system like Chinese or Korean (forgot the name, Hanguk or something like that I think).
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just because we know how to read now, doesn't mean the articles are gonna get read
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I've known for about 20 years that we don't focus on one letter. There are numerous books that show that we (at least those using Latin alphabets) look at the shape of the top half of the word rather than each letter. All this does is break down literacy to crossing eyes, etc. Not really new.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Is this why when I was watching Total Recall that girl had 3 boobs? Were my eyes just tricking me and she only had 2?
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
You remember all that, the letter order doesn't matter when reading bit? (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000840.php for a refresher).
It's always seemed pretty apparent to me that we don't reach letters in "correct order" by focusing only on a single one at a time. If that were the case things like speed-reading and scanning for content would be nearly impossible. Outside confirmation of this is nice however.
The real question is how much redundancy can we remove from printed words for faster information dispersal while still expressing things clearly. Sure, having everything spelled correctly and in long form is great for books for pleasure (art) but do we really need it for basic information sharing? Especially if doing so increases the time spent needlessly?
--- I do not moderate.
[i]"A follow-up experiment with the eye-tracking equipment showed that we only see one clear image when reading because our brain fuses the different images from our eyes together."[/i] Wait... they neeeded a follow up experiment to discover something that is so well known that it s rather common knowledge? I mean.. the other stuff isnt actually news either but this... and how does eye-trracking lead to a RESULT about what the brain does. I mean... an eye tracking experiment leading to a thesis.. or supporting a thesis about bain function... that sounds logic to me. To sum this up.. this slashdot article is badly written in multiple aspects.
Very interesting. I wonder if this could be a contributing factor to why folks get headaches when reading on some computer screens. That is, computers, unlike books, are constantly redrawing the screen so not all of the letters may actually be visible very well at any one time. Your brain starts straining because it can't scan multiple letters (or entire words?) very well due to the flicker. Do eletronic book readers have a high refresh rate?
And I wonder how many people actually choose to read from that far away (?) In my observations, most people are at considerably less than half that distance from their monitor or book, especially for those of us who are near-sighted.
I'm a cyclopse.
But really, while I have two working eyes, they're independent of one another. So at any given time, I'm looking at something with just one eye.
Reading is a process of pattern recognition. We recognize and assemble patterns of letters/symbols and then associate those patterns with meaning. Some people can recognize larger patterns at a time, other people can only recognize shorter patterns. Most people move past the "processing a single letter at a time" stage of pattern recognition at a young age. Personally, I read whole multiple words or even short sentences at a time.
This has been known for a very long time.
Typographers have used ligatures for ages. Now we have a scientific explanation.
It seems that technical documentation is often optimised to take advantage of this phenomenon. For instance, recent tests on IBM's Tivoli Access Manager docs caused my eyes to cross 130% of the time.
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
I'll keep my eyes crossed for that.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
Seriously, try this one, Mr. Wizard:
From http://www.gobiged.com/wfdata/frame265-1059/pressrel45.aspThere is no internal 'viewscreen' that the brain displays the images on. (a so called "cartesian theater" ) after all, if that happens, who is watching the screen and how does that work ?
Instead of an internal 'framebuffer' I think* it's more like a MVC kind of system. Instead of pasting parts of images on an internal framebuffer to make up a whole, the individual parts are used to fill the datamodel of the world you've got inside your head. You 'see' the datamodel.
* - This is all just a bit of philosophizing on my side, I may be completely wrong.
In my defense, I must say it was really hard to proofread.
The article only touches on this (last word in the entire story), but this should have ramifications in studying and treating dyslexia. At first glance, it would seem very strange how people could suffer from dyslexia. Why would they perceive pairs of letters and numbers as flipped, if we read in a serial fashion? If both eyes aren't even looking at the same letter then the physiology begins to make more sense - somewhere along the way the information isn't being assembled in the proper order.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I can read Harry Potter simply through identifiation of the word shapes; I don't have to recognize each letter because I (i.e. my brain) has a reasonable expectation of the subject matter and the sentence structure. In other words, there is some top-down interpretation--it's not all what I see, it's what my brain thinks I'm seeing.
The same is not true when reading Kant's metaphysics of morals. Translated into English from German (iirc), with a difficult sentence structure and challenging subject matter, I have to read every word carefully. This is not skimming.
Can you type a little more slowly? I'm having trouble keeping up ...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
OK, I'm hoping the real article is not nearly as silly as this blurb. I'm sure it talks about this situation in more reasonable terms. But the blurb focuses on eye position and implies that it has meaning on a letter level.
While the issue of eye position is interesting, we are NOT focusing on a letter. We are not reading letters, much less looking at them.
Hold you arm out. Raise your thumb. Look at it. The space of the back of your thumb, at that distance is special. That's your fovea -- the area of your eye which has the greatest acuity. When you read, depending on font size and text distance, that area covers multiple lines of text, and usually more than one word. Focusing on a letter means picking that letter as a point in the text, and seeing the areas around it.
A strong reader is picking up both the words below and left and right of the word he/she is reading at that fraction of a second.
Yes, it's interesting to ask where we fixate. Yes, it's VERY interesting that we go crosseyed and that begs the question of whether we do it systematically to reduce the amount of new data which is common in both foveas, either to increase speed by processing both independently, or to reduce the amount in common and thus reduce the load that reading takes (you'd possibly see that in a "difficult" or unfamiliar word). However, we do NOT look at letters. They're just a spot.
Someone asked here about other languages, do we do the same thing for Kanji, Hangul, etc.? Is suspect that things might be different there, as I suspect that this behavior that they've found is strongly connected with syllable boundaries in English. However, eye-trackers are notoriously inaccurate (unless you're willing to have a coil surgically implanted in your eye, and even then, it ain't fantastic) and so their letter accuracy information must come from AVERAGES ACROSS MULTIPLE OBSERVATIONS. This should lead us to ask what their dataset was and what behavior they saw on specific character clusters. (That, in turn leads us to question if they got enough data to get much accuracy on those clusters.)
It would be nice to see the original article, as opposed to this fluff piece.
So you don't really understand what I'm saying when I say.
Where did you get the form from
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
It would be interesting to compare tactile reading to visual reading. How much is pre-processed by the eye(s), how much is handled by the brain, and how much is routed around the brain?
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Given that this is slashdot and all... I've got to wonder why you didn't whip up a quick script to do your internal reversing? :P
Thanks. Now I know why I was having trouble reading it.
...which is probably why font designers spend all that time setting up kerning pairs.
Breakfast served all day!
The article isn't talking about "learning to read" though, it's talking about how we read. It makes no distinction at all about how we learn to read, and therefore has absolutely nothing to do with "whole language" method versus phonetic method.
By the way, I've never seen your example before and the only word I had trouble with was "Adults" in the first sentence. Once I saw it repeated, however, the context made sense and it was fairly obvious what the paragraph was saying. As for children "basically guessing at what words mean" that's been the case for as long as children have been learning to read. Just ask any child what words mean as they're reading and much (not most but much) of the time you'll find they aren't sure and guess.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Who owns the patent on this method and, will we all be expected to pay licensing fees?
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
I'd be curious if the effect works with braille. Is the information routed through the area of the brain needed to "unmix" letters or not? I would guess yes, but the result would be interesting either way. Some processes take place in the eye itself, but this doesn't seem like one of them.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It's probably more likely that our eyes just are not able to accurately position on a page of text. The brain tells both eyes to 'look at' the same exact place, but due to variations in muscle response and delays getting the command sent to the eye they end up at slightly different places.
You could probably reduce this error though by putting features on the page of text that let the eye track better than vast areas of white. For instance if the same shape and size text was engraved in natural wood the eye would probably be a lot more accurate in positioning to a specific letter.
I doubt this is any more a strategy for reading than it is just a fact of life.
you insensitive clods!!
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
i can still read...
There is a framebuffer. It's called persistence of vision. I agree with you about everything else though. Some people do wait for each letter or pair to come into focus. Others pattern match entire concepts and associate based on that and move on without taking the time to bring all the symbols into focus. Trouble can happen when what you expected to see is not what is written but the process is adaptive and you slow down on new ideas and clever turns of phrase. Interestingly the latter method is better for recall because the nature of memory in the time domain gives disadvantage to ideas spooled in slowly rather than swallowed whole.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Why can't one of you people read even just the first two paragraphs of the article? Sheesh. This is not about chunking.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Before we get yet another "I always knew I didn't look at one letter at a time! I read whole words at a time! hyuk hyuk", please go read the first two paragraphs of the damn article. Or, for that matter, the summary right here on Slashdot. I don't think I have yet seen even one response I didn't write that understood they were talking about the reader's eyes looking at two different things at the same time.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Not every one can come up with ground breaking research all the time. Sometimes when your department head or advisor is pressuring you for some results after your last two papers came up with negative results you need to just come up with something that you know is guaranteed to come up with positive results (no matter how obvious) to justify your existance. People have mouths to feed, and the economy has to keep going forward. Not to mention people have to graduate to make room for more slave^H^H^H^H^Hhard working graduate students, and researchers have to find a way to spend all of that research money so they can get some more... /sarcasm_off
In my observation, "whole word recognition" (or "see first three letters, make WAG at rest of word") is how many dyslexics read (actually, ALL those I know personally and have watched reading do WWR of some sort). WWR simply teaches everyone to read at the minimal level achieved by untutored dyslexics. IOW, it makes everyone equally crippled!
When I RTFA, my first thought was -- Oh, that explains "letters crawl around" dyslexics; their brain doesn't re-integrate the letter groups properly.
I'm also reminded of a friend who has been in the dyslexia research program at the university in San Diego for over 25 years... where they found that an instant cure could be achieved by reading glasses which cause "lag" for one eye, causing the letters to be processed in the correct order.
So... TFA isn't so much news as confirmation of what we already knew.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
My mom once told a story about the one time that my cousin was helping her with some baking. She was like, "Q, read off the recipe to me", and he said, "blah blah blah, Pecans, blah blah". My mom was like, "pecans? This recipe doesn't call for Pecans. ???"
So she went and looked at the recipe herself, and it called for walnuts. She was like, "Q, this says 'Walnuts', not 'Pecans'." Cousin Q responded that they were both nuts, and didn't get why it was important.
My mom talked to her mother in law, who got Q on a phonics program.
Gatto says that the switcheroo took place during WWII, and parents who were getting on with their lives post-war didn't notice that their kids weren't learning to read with the Whole Language Learning scam.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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'As for children "basically guessing at what words mean" that's been the case for as long as children
have been learning to read.'
Er, well, not for those taught phonics. To us, ALL words consist of recognisable parts, and we almost never have to make a wild guess at the meaning; rather, we can judge probable meaning by those parts we CAN decipher. Which means we're never entirely lost, even in a sea of unfamilar words.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
So this implies we couldn't read as fast with one of our eyes closed? Go try it. I guess i was slowed down a little bit...but not a great deal.
It's my own manipulation of an interesting paragraph I read while doing some amateur research on the ridiculous Cambridge 'study'.
The only problem with "research" like that is when such memes acquire huge impact by incessant repetition. In part, that's how Whole Language became foisted on unsuspecting schoolchildren: Education policy wonks figured that since proficient adult readers can "read" whole words at once, let's be all frikkin' clever and skip the (obviously unnecessary) "phonics" part.
Putting the cart before the course, so to speak, which had the effect of crowding out effective reading methodologies in schools. Only recently have phonics and other evidence-based programs regained traction in schools.
Interesting manipulation. I had assumed you pulled it from somewhere. Pedantic nag, it's "cart before the horse" not "course".
I have an 11 year old daughter and she has been in 4 different school systems (we move a lot) and was only taught "whole language" reading in one place (supplemented by phonics at home when she was 3 and 4) so I wasn't aware it was a big issue. The only other kids I know that were taught "whole language" method were in that particular school district and they didn't seem to be having very much trouble while reading in class. Perhaps it was because they already knew how to read, but they certainly seemed to understand (as much as any other kids do) what they were reading.
I think it's easier for children to learn phonetically because it breaks things into smaller parts, but I don't know that it's any better or worse. I also don't know that the article mentioned will do anything to address that issue.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
I'm guessing you haven't done too much reading out loud with children, but I can guarantee you that every kid I've ever read outloud with (which is an admittedly small number of 20-30) was indeed guessing words regularly. Especially when reading new things.
Sounding out a word doesn't automatically create some sort of magical understanding of meaning, though it can occasionally help. As for "we're never entirely lost, even in a sea of unfamiliar words" I'd wager that's about equivalent for children taught using any method. If you know some words you will be able to infer meanings of others. If you don't know any of the words, your phonetics simply won't make any damn difference.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
It is nice to think that this may have some application to the treatment of dyslexia but it is naive in the extreme. Research like this will be focused on treating other, more devastating, disorders. In the end it comes down to the fact that if you have dyslexia then your childhood education will suck but you can adapt yourself to the situation and become a fully functional member of society. I would kill any three people to cure my self of dyslexia but in the end medical science has better things to do with its funding.
Anyone else end up with a headache while trying to independantly prove or disprove the findings of the study?
I need to go home now.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Words kind of look like cars in a train. Some are longer and shorter than others. Some have big "wheels" (descenders) or thingees sticking up. I have word shapes memorized for standard modern fonts, but if see a strange font or handwrighting, then I go back to letter mode. I thing the "shape" mechanism is why the scrambling the letters inside a word, but not the first and last character, is generally readable.
Dotters read an article only 53 % of the time.
39% of the time they begin posting comments without reading the article at all.
8% of the time they read the wrong article entirely and post anyway.
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How does this change the dynamics? Is there an upper limit placed on max reading speed, I read faster than most people do, but I know that the few people read faster than I do dramatically overshoot any speeds I could hope to achieve.
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Eureka!!!!
And how is this supposed to benefit the world???
From: dearstan7001
They say that roughly 50% of the time you are focused on two different letters. Most of that is with uncrossed eyes and a little bit with crossed line of sight.
To tinhk of it anehtor way, your eyes are not ncesesrilay radineg the leterts in the same oredr as you wolud eexpct (left to right).
Take this example: Think and Tihnk.
The new study suggests that when I read the word "Think" I'm mostly just reading it one letter after the other in order. It also suggests that some of the time I'm reading the "H" with my left and my right eye reads the "I". But, the study also suggests that our eyes can cross, so when I look at "Tihnk" maybe my eyes are reading it the other way round, "I" with my right and "H" with my left. This leaves you with the exact same letter order as the properly spelt word. Thus implying that the order of the letters in a word are not as important as you might think. With the addition of a first and last letter rule for a bit of added linguistic comprehension, this is much the same as the Cambridge study you mentioned.
I don't know whether I managed to convey my point very well, but I hope you understand what I'm getting at. From my perspective the two studies seem to go hand in hand.
Yes, science is science, but one has to wonder how to keep from going mad from getting the twelve hundred daily emails from various people about the amazing researchers at Cmatbdige Uvisrtisy. I mean, enough with the stupid letter transposition posts already. Yes, it is amazing. We get it.
Karma troll. He also replies to almost every FP.
Barcelona is a major architectural change for AMD and in the future it will .... oh wait, wrong section.
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of Europe, rather than German, which was the other possibilty. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish":
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with " f ". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the 4th yar, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with"z" and "w" with "y". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaing "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leteres. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no more trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.
ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!!!! (Und zen ve vil take over ze vorld!!!!!)
Maybe our eyes are looking at multiple letters simultaneously a lot of the time in order to find where one ends and the next begins. How can we find the separate individual letters without inspecting them to see if they're not just a single letter?
This is interesting research, but the conclusions seem hasty.
--
make install -not war
My cousin is now doing fine, thanks to Grandma's intervention. He's a senior partner in a structural engineering firm, and has more money than he knows what to do with.
Not being able to tell the difference between 'pecans' and 'walnuts' is exactly the kind of fuckup you'd expect when children are taught to read with whole-word methodology. Written English is phonetic, and this is how it should be taught (excepting special circumstances - I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure it's possible).
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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I've only seen with one eye my whole life, and still I can read. I guess my method differs then, eh? ;)
Although this might explain (to some degree) why I'm so damned slow at reading.
Indeed, it's been known by type designers and typesetters for a long time how immersive reading works. It's a fairly complicated process, more so than this new "two-letters-at-a-time "discovery" suggests. Your fovea takes in the entire shape of a word while your parafovea sees the surrounding words, and in this manner your eye skips along, actually focussing on only a few spots per line of text.
In fact, for efficient (speed) reading, your eyes can be trained to reading an entire line in a single glance. The private school I attended had mandatory speed-reading classes, and I maxed out the tachistoscope (speed-reading machine) at 1,800 words per minute. At such a reading pace, there's little margin for eye movement; you simply scroll your eyes down the middle of a column of text.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
It might be more along the lines of...
39% of dotheads begin posting without reading the article at all.
8% of dotheads read the wrong article and post anyway.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Mod Insightful - if you just think it's funny, you didn't RTFA. Though it it pretty damn funny too.
"Er, well, not for those taught phonics. To us, ALL words consist of recognisable parts, and we almost never have to make a wild guess at the meaning; rather, we can judge probable meaning by those parts we CAN decipher. Which means we're never entirely lost, even in a sea of unfamilar words."
I have read this a dozen times and every time I reach the end of it I say to my self "WHAT?!"
You are a complete and total fucktard.
Actually, I can promise you that you're right. I teach adult literacy in my free time, and I can assure you that my students would get nowhere fast with text like that.
I could try it, just to be sure, but it would be cruel and stupid to do so.
expandfairuse.org
That does sound cruel, subjecting adult literacy learners to this! Word games like the one I suggested are only fun for people fluent in written and spoken forms of the language.
People whose first language isn't English frequently view Scrabble as a severe sort of punishment...
I think we need to be better about teaching our kids morphemes. We need to be able to break a word down to its most basic parts and glean its meaning from those parts. I'm teaching my four year old using phonics, but I will eventually graduate him to morphemes.