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."

Comments

Frsit Psot

[Harmonious Botch]

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.

flawed in the first place

[WiglyWorm]

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....

Re:flawed in the first place

[Verteiron]

A_d y_t t___e e___a l_____s a_e i_______t.

And yet those extra letters are important.

Bt yu cn lv ot innr vwls and stll be mstly rdble.

Non-alphabetic systems?

[natpoor]

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.

That explains it!

[DeeVeeAnt]

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.

"Bnikaerg-dwon"pemenohs allacitamotuy, aletaruccy?

[dzurn]

Baloney. If we can read that it's because we are already good readers. "Whole Language" is where good readers end up, but that's not how we learn to BECOME good readers.

Seriously, try this one, Mr. Wizard:

"Atluds nveer tkae tmie to tnihk aoubt how to pcnuonore the iaudividnl wdros; tehy jsut sacn anolg at a vrey fsat cilp and triehr bniars tkae crae of the "bnikaerg-dwon" of the pmargonohs allacitamotuy and aletaruccy. Hevewor, ttha's atluds who lenraed to raed wtih pcinohs. Atluds who rley olny on shgit-rgnidaeg teuqinhces rleray gnia mcuh foitcnun, and boy, deos taht sohw in our steicoy tadoy, wtih rlevitaley low lleves of lcaretiy cerapmod to gnoitarenes psat. Cerdlihn tadoy, who dno't hvae pcinohs ioitcurtsnn, are bllacisay gnisseug at waht wdros maen, and it swohs in enihtyrevg form sezidradnatd tset serocs to lcaretiy deicneicifes in the wcalpkroe."

From http://www.gobiged.com/wfdata/frame265-1059/pressrel45.asp

Y Hole Langwidg Seams OK

[...] Adults never take time to think about how to pronounce the individual words; they just scan along at a very fast clip and their brains take care of the "breaking down" of the phonograms automatically and accurately. However, that's adults who learned to read with phonics. Adults who rely only on sight-reading techniques rarely gain much function, and boy, does that show in our society today, with relatively low levels of literacy compared to generations past. Children today, who don't have phonics instruction, are basically guessing at what words mean, and it shows in everything from standardized test scores to literacy deficiencies in the workplace.