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Skilled Readers Recognize Words By Shape
hessian writes "Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists. The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain 'sounds out' words each time we see them."
Pop quiz! who read it correctly? who read it "first post"?
I always suspected that I read like that. I only have to spell words I don't know, or chop them up into syllables.
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This is why we are bugged by bad spelling.
Interesting- I read about two or three times as fast as my wife and we've talked abou this before.
(frustrating when trying to read an e-mail together on the same PC at the same time).
She does sound out words in her head- I don't- I just tend to zip over them. There again- speed has its consequences- she tends to remember what she read better than I do.
I'll be reading a book and then realise I've been on auto-pilot for the last 3 pages and actually have no recollection of what I just read.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Interesting. I was under the impression that this is common sense. Maybe I should have spoken it out aloud in order to get all the praise. ;) Pretty interesting still to know that this is scientifically proven now. I wonder if this could be used for learning another language.
Aoccdrnig to a 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 total 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. Amzanig huh?
I have a strange disorder, where I can't recognize words by shape, I have to read the words specifically, very carefully before I know what they are. It's unfortunate.
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I've seen this before. Just last week I was talking to my wife about how it's easier reading lowercase letters than uppercase because the word shapes are more distinct.
My daughter come home from 2nd Grade every week with a list of 'sight-words' to focus on - that is, words that were intended to be immediately recognized, not sounded out.
Glad modern science has caught up with elementary school.
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Often when I am reading, especially if I am tired or kind of zoned out, I will find myself almost skimming over words and reading them, but not really seeing them. I'll be at one spot on the page, then the next thing I know I will find myself several lines, if not a paragraph or 2, away from where I last remember reading, but I will have read the words without realizing it, and can remember what I read.
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Yes it is a visual dictionary and if it is a cache-miss, then the fallback behavior is to re-parse the word slowly and sound it out. After a few encounters with a strange word it becomes visually cached as well. Parsing a word is far slower, of course, and is not the default behavior.
I really like this bit of word recognition:
"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 ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl 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."
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=60788&PageTemplateID=295
Especially for non-character based writing like Chinese.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
An older /. post has more to say on the topic, specifically:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.
I always recognize the word boobs.
You type boobs in any font, it's like I have super powers.
Boobs. B00Bs. 80085. Anything you do - I recognize it immediately.
Don't know about other word, but that one just strikes me as very recognizable.
The reason we learn to sound out words is so that we can figure out new words. Phonics is a horrible way to read.
...and why I am a fairly slow reader.
Interestingly, though, my fingers on a keyboard has become yet another form of brain-to-external-world communications. So words and meanings come out through patterns of movement in my fingers. I think "word" and the movements for "word" comes out in my fingers. The "sound" for "word" doesn't necessarily go through my brain unless I am thinking that way -- when I am more relaxed and less deliberate, words go directly from my brain to my finger movements.
Consequently, some typos come in the form of entire words where sometimes I might write "jr;;p" instead of "hello" because the placement of my hands are off.... though most often the misalignment is on the left hand only. Other typos, however, come in the form of inconvenient word choice and even word omission. Countless times I have submitted comments here in which I thought a word and failed to type it for whatever reason... other times, whole words were substituted for others... often with opposite meanings. Very embarrassing, but I have explored the causes and my conclusions are not unlike the findings in this article.
But you know, we have all known this at some level already. We can substitute a 1 for a lower-case L almost anywhere and people can read the word and often never notice... same is true of upper-case I and lower-case L depending on the fonts being used. So I hope this study isn't considered "new knowledge" but rather an expansion or an elaboration of what we already know because, we all kind of knew this already.
I dbuot scietncestis put mcuh stcok in the torehy taht our bainrs 'sunod out' ecah wrod ecah tmie we see tehm.
does anybody sound the words out in their minds ever? Serious question: do any of you actually spell the words out phonetically in your mind while reading?
You can't handle the truth.
I always wondered if other people read like this. Often, I read multiple paragraphs of, say, a news article before a fellow family member has read a sentence. Consequently, I seem to forget the content of what I read more often (as other ./-ers have stated), but hey, at least I read faster. :)
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I'm pretty sure we've known this for many decades.
from nearly 10 years ago (with research back another 20)
http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion.php?id=110&oid=265
It's already been well established that at least many people read this way.
Its common knowledge that most people can read normal (lower) case text faster than upper case text. And it has long been surmised that its due to the much better word shape diversity of lower case.
Its also common knowledge that most people can read jumbled up words with very little difficulty, as long as the first and last letters are correct, and the rest of the letters are in there in a random order.
Such as:
"I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae."
Given the number of people who can read the above almost effortlessly, anyone clinging to the theory that fast readers are "sounding words out" needs to be clubbed over the head with a baseball bat.
It also rebuts the premise of the article that we read by word shape. Its clearly a bit more complicated than that.
I expect we simultaneously look at word shape, the leading and closing letters, the length, and the middle letters along with some "predictive" matching based on context cues so we can narrow down likely candidate words that "fit" the sentence.
...and forces you to consider the matter more in depth. It breaks the normal shape of words and sentences.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
According to a raseerch at Caibrmdge Unviersity, it deosn't mettar in waht oedrr the letetrs in a wrod are. The olny imaortpnt thnig is taht the fisrt and lsat letetr be in the rgiht plcae.
The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wiohtut peoblrm. Tihs is bucaese the hmuan mnid deos not raed erevy letter by itslef, but the wrod as a whloe.
http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp
When the British decided to implement their current system of road direction signs, they switched from all-caps to mixed-case precisely for this reason: people remember the general shapes of words and the positioning of ascenders and descenders, thus people found it far easier to distinguish, say, "Brighton" than "BRIGHTON". This was many decades ago - how is this news?
I've previously been rather bemused by people complaining about old news, but now i understand.
Microsoft, of all places, has a pretty good webpage on this.
Check out the "Model 1: Word Shape" section, in which this theory is described as "oldest model in the psychological literature, and is likely much older than the psychological literature"
There's some other interesting sections there too, like the moving window study.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
This was proven false a number of years ago, by a college in western Canada as I recall. If the order of the internal letters are reversed, it becomes impossible to read without deciphering each word.
Exercise for the student.
I often read street signs at night, making out the word before the letters are truly readable, so obviously I'm not actually "reading" in the sense that I'm recognizing individual letters. But normally is sound out the individual words in my head. I'm a slow reader, and that is a hindrance in the computer industry (plus, I miss the enjoyment of reading a lot of books, because it just takes to long).
Could I read faster if I could somehow train myself to do this word recognition thing?
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I frequently don't have to read words directly because I can detect them through peripheral vision and context.
Perhaps related to this, I frequently get distracted while reading but keep going, understanding the meaning of the language but not becoming aware of the individual words.
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For the exact same reason.
This comes as no surprise to me. I'm an American learning Swedish, but nearly all of my learning is done at the computer. I hang out in IRC channels, read Swedish news sites, etc. I rarely watch videos or listen to radio. As a result, I can read and write Swedish quite well but am completely incapable of speaking or understanding spoken Swedish. I've been accused of abusing Google Translate to read/write because so few people believe I'm capable of understanding the written language as well as I can while struggling to comprehend even the simplest spoken phrases. I meet Swedish people on chat rooms and forums all the time, so I get plenty of practice with reading and writing. It's not so easy finding someone to practice the spoken language with while living in Kansas.
This finding would indicate that careful font selection could make a significant difference to reading speed.
As I read, I read to myself in my head, not sounding out letters, but the words as I go. Whenever I see this example of transposition, that voice in my head starts to sound like it has Down syndrome.
it's called skim-reading. i read a 300-page novel in about 2 hours, but that's a leisurely pace, for me. i can do 3 lines at a time if i want, just read the first words, jump several and diagonally down, hit the end of the 3rd line, repeat. eyes spot paragraph beginnings and ends and focus on those: this is standard stuff if you've ever read tony buzan's books, what's the big deal? i don't recall - ever - my lips moving, or there being any "sounds" occurring in my bwwaiiiin. yes there's a sort-of delay between words coming in and getting through but, isn't that normal?
6 months later i'll come back, read and enjoy the same book again, and find very occasionally that i missed something. perhaps i shouldn't ask, but how does everyone else "read"?
There are multiple cognitive structures used in reading. There are all kinds of experiments where people can read perfectly well with letters removed from words and/or words with their letter order jumbled. This proves that word shape though probably necessary in speed reading is only one layer on many layers of cognitive infrastructure used in the process of reading as a whole.
FYI: This "shape recognition" mechanism had been suspected for quite a long time -- ever since it was shown years ago that people can read lowercase faster and more accurately than uppercase. (Lowercase letters have more variation in shape because of ascenders and descenders.)
The only time I sound out words is when shape fails me. For example, I have trouble telling the difference between "marital" and "martial". The shape difference is too subtle for my eye, and I have to fall back to sounding them out.
They do not "sound out" words. They allegedly read much faster as a result because the words are just symbols and aren't slowed by the corresponding auditory pace.
The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain 'sounds out' words each time we see them.
No, it most certainly DOES NOT rebut that theory, for two reasons:
(1) Homo sapiens is not a homogenous species; there are mutations - including neurological ones - and divergent evolutionary paths being explored with every single new birth; and
(2) I am living fucking proof that at least some humans have brains that do in fact sound out words, and quite literally so.
In order to communicate with a written language, I am forced to subvocalize - literally hear the words in my head - every bit of text that I read as well as write. What's more, I am unable to listen to any other spoken words while I am involved in this subvocalization process. This was quite destructive especially during schooling, since I was unable to take notes in class, and even recording lectures for later transcription was impractical.
My best theory, lacking the results of an fMRI experiment to prove it, is that this subvocalization is actually re-purposing the auditory processing center for written language, and in doing so makes it temporarily unavailable for its original purpose.
So, the genius who thinks the tinkering of these neuroscientists disproves the existence of alternative language processing methods is not so bright after all. I welcome that fMRI experiment to rebut the rebuttal.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with the fact that by the 100th time this is reposted you already know what it says and speed-read it anyway and enjoy a nice dose of coaifrnimton bais.
This was known about in Britain in the late 50s, when signs were being designed for Britain's first motorways. Given the high speed cars would be travelling at, the signs had to be quick and easy to read. The designers chose to use mixed case as they knew people recognise words by shape (which was a major change from the existing practice of using all capitals on road signs).
We do go by pictures of the words instead of trying to read each letter of the word.
1. Something written using the words you know but different spelling?
dis iz nut sum tin hue kan reed faast bee coz you arr juss nut uzed to sea ying eet liek dat.
2. How about some capitalization to make things hard to read?
tHiS sEntEnCe iS gOiNg To bE hArdEr tO REaD bEcAuSe yOu cAN't rEcOGNiZE tHe wOrDS aS eAsILY.
3. how about some number replacements?
Y0U C4N R34D TH1S TEXT W1TH0UT TO0 MUCH PR0BL3M 8EC4USE 1T 1S L337-5P33K.
I think for general population, the first example is going to be hardest to read because the words make the familiar sounds but they're not in the right shape. If you go phonetically alone, that should have been easy read. I would think the third example is going to be easiest to read for most people, the words look familiar even though they clearly have numbers instead of some of the letters.
I don't know that anyone has ever held a "theory that our brain 'sounds out' words each time we see them".
The study's authors are now busy memorizing the shape of the word "Duh."
The link is to a press release announcing study results. Reading the press release we learn the study was of 12 volunteers. I find it difficult to get too interested in a communications office news release about research on so small a scale.
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Oprah had a guy on TV so long ago that I can't remember who said this very thing ... he was some super speed reader guy.
How do I get paid to 'research' things people already know? I'm jealous
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I have known this for over 30 years, it was explained to me to show why ALL CAPS was very hard to read, since the brain can not recognize the shape of the word, it has to read it letter by letter.
Anyone who needs reading glasses because of age already knows this. As my eyes got worse I could still recognize words where I could not read all the letters just by seeing the first letter, last letter and the shape. Convenient when I forgot my glasses and tried to read a menu.
I find that the converse is true for me when it comes to typing. For example, when I type some words, my mind doesn't think of each letter separately, but instead, my fingers blast out the correct motions on the keyboard and the correct word appears.
we use procedures where I work, many times i'm doing something i've done a hundred times before. I recognize what the step is by the shape of the paragraph or wording on the page.....
anybody who trained in speed reading knows the goal is training your brain to recognize words, phrases and whole lines at an instant-- it is far more like recognizing an icon or doing huge numbers of complex flash cards --- more seeing the forest than it is bothering with the trees. (and misspellings may cause one to focus on a word because it stands out or it may go completely unnoticed because its close enough-- since image recognition of the brain is fuzzy and tolerant by nature.)
These games with text work best if you can maintain the visual recognition level and I suspect somebody somewhere is working on the aspects of this recognition process to decide what shapes are noticed how the brain spots such shapes despite differing fonts and sizes etc. Its not a literal photo matching process as the text games illustrate because the word can look visually quite different with the letters shifted slightly. More research will happen (if we fund it.)
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I can read it perfectly, but the manner of speech changed.
this shouid be cornptetely olvious to evenyone!
I read this on a bottle of Vitamin Water where they change the order of the letters and only keep the first and last ones correct.
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I've noticed this since about third grade. I can read faster (by a lot usually) than pretty much everybody I ever encounter. However, if I'm reading a book and two or more characters have names that "look" like each other, it seriously messes me up. That and spelling was very difficult before spell checkers came about. I can tell that something is spelled wrong because it looks off, but can't sound out how to actually spell it. Also, reading out loud was VERY painful for me all through school and even now I avoid it at all costs. So reading quickly came with a few downsides. It's still awesome to blow through pretty large books in less than a day though.
Maybe, I haven't extensively tested it. But I tried the upper/lower test on a friend whose first written language was Arabic, but he's been fluent in English for about 30 years, starting as a teenager. He found all upper and mixed case equally easy to read.
It's probably how we were raised.
This study doesn't so much rebut phonics -long proven as an effective method of teaching literacy in most scripts- as much as it shows that phonics is only the baseline: what people fall back on when more advanced heuristics (like shape recognition) fail. And fail they do, from time to time: that's just the nature of heuristics. They work often enough to provide appreciable speed boosts -even huge ones- but fail often enough that you can't completely discard slower methods.
What this study suggests to me is that while having a solid grasp of phonics is a major milestone in literacy training, it should not be the end of said training (as it often is). Rather, once the students can walk, it is time to teach them to run: I don't know how you'd teach shape recognition, for example, but this is something that might have use as an advanced reading technique.
It is, however, still important not to try teaching the students to run before they can walk. The various attempts to replace phonics in the last few decades have ended in dismal failure, and they failed for a reason. That doesn't make phonics the be-all and end-all, but it remains the best foundation skill for reading yet devised.
read subjects.
This result seems fairly obvious to anyone who has looked at typography. It explains a lot of the rules of thumb used in font design. For example, one of the characteristics of a legible font is that ascenders and descenders are neither too-long nor too-short. Character shapes that are too-expanded or too-condensed or just weird are bad, too. These characteristics probably screw up the shape too much. Same with line spacing. Too narrow makes it hard to see the word shape on either line easily.
That is all.
Interesting, but surely you're in the minority here? Not many people will do that.
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I subvocalize exactly like you do. However, I think the distinction made by the article may be less than what you're asserting. Even though I hear words in my head, I *don't* process letters or syllables within a given word. I read an entire word at a time, recognize that word, and then hear it. The individual letters and syllables never play a role unless the word isn't familiar. I still recognize words based on shape; I just do so one word at a time and with an internal vocalization.
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Interesting. FYI, I don't think anyone can really take notes and listen at the same time, what happens for me is that I keep half-listening to a lecture while I'm writing. There is definitely some context-switching that goes on, and lots of what is said is lost, but I tend to "trigger" listening when something interesting or unusual is said.
Reading words by sounding them out is like adding numbers by counting on your fingers. It's how a novice does it. If people read by sounding words, how would those who are born deaf ever learn to do it? I figured this was obvious, but apparently it isn't.
That is why bad spelling is so hard to read
Recent press release from Georgetown University Medical Center's Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neurosciences announces breakthrough scientific discovery: a statistically significant majority of neuroscientists have no familiarity with Hanzi, Kanji, and other ideographic written languages used by over a third of Earth's current population.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Newspapers use thin columns so our eyes don't need to move much. Books and the web could benefit from this approach.
I wonder if the logical conclusion of this is to format words/letters into a Hilbert or Z-order fractal curve like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve
This optimizes the locality of the words, and reduces our eye movement to a minimum. At least in theory...
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What if the visual pattern recognition is actually happening all or in part in the auditory processing center? We think we're "hearing" the words, but what if that isn't what's happening? Ever hear of synesthesia?
The same way. You were taught to read letter by letter, but you were jumping ahead and guessing the whole word before you've red all letters. Glad they noticed everybody is still doing it. Experts in AI can prove the order only complicates things.
The news for me is that there are people who don't read like that. How else do you recognize a street name on a faraway sign before you can actually make out the letters?
I couldn't/can't even half-listen; it's so all-or-nothing it's maddening. Well, at least when I'm faced with the need to attempt it. The rest of the time I'm fine with it, even though it also guarantees I read slower than everyone else. I'm also a wicked proofreader and likely have a superior vocabulary because of it. Yin and Yang....
...although it might be because I have trouble reading at a distance unless I stay off the computers for a few days.
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Minority or not, I'm evidence that the rebuttal... isn't.
The first-last shape thing works well as long as the overall "word shape" remains unchanged.
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Compare this:
Tbe qaiok bnamn fax janqs ouar tbe loxy dag.
To this:
Tie qbdlk bhtdn fyx jglys ojbr txe lyjy dbg.
The difference?
The first one substitutes like-for like shaped letters - b for h and no-ascender/no-descender letters for the rest. The second line does the opposite.
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That does not make sense. You say she's better off because "she can speed up". In reality she can only read faster by ignoring parts of the input (what you call "not essential"), which besides making the two processes not comparable, it also requires her making assumptions on the fly about those parts before getting to read them. This can - and often does - result in reading comprehension issues with all but the simplest material. These "inessential" parts are often skipped when her mind's made up and she's convinced she already "got it", for example as in a conversation where she'd have the reply on its way out way before you're done talking.
You however are in a bad position. If you try to sound words out, you'll slow down
To begin with, he has no need to sound words out, therefore it is not relevant how much he'd slow down had he tried to. So whether this is a "bad position" is an entirely academic issue at this point, since no real life scenario actually involves your premise.
I think it was around thirty, maybe forty years ago there was the educationalist craze du jour for "sight reading". It started out from research that was remarkably like this, apparently, and fell to pieces because it made the usual educationalist blunder of confusing results with method. True, experienced, performant readers do recognize many words on shape rather than by examination, but that doesn't mean you can skip the sound-it-out stage with early readers.
That was one generation of semi-literate idiots. What's your excuse, Slashies?
Theyre not clear what they mean by sound out. I am most comfortable at a pace where i can hear each word, but this hearing is optional and follows recognition of the whole word in most cases - i still get the gist when i run my eyes more quickly, but then it is easier to lapse into a routine of running my eyes over text without reading.
This has been known since the early 90s, when it had to be explained why attempts to teach literacy via whole-word recognition in the 80s had produced children with diminished reading skills. People recognize words in whole, but they must learn them phonetically.
*Gasp* Something that apparently only humans can do is complicated? Although animals can associate symbols with concepts in a similar way, they can't actually read. Certainly they haven't been shown to be able to make sense out of written information the same way the primates can work with sign language.
This is the first real evidence of an alternate theory. One camp has evidence, the other camp has evidence, eventually the next generation of researchers will find it's more complicated than that.
Just like we had DNA, then Nature/Nuture, then epigenetics, epigenetic inheritance, and more to come. As always, nothing in science is absolute. In fact, a good scientist assumes everything is wrong, or at least not complete, until everything about it is completely understood and explained. Tomorrow we may learn the sun does not exist, but is instead hawking radiation from a tiny black hole, due to new measurements from some newly built observatory.
And while you're at it, club me over the head with a bat. I can make the argument that the jumbled mess of a sentence you posted is a collection of very simple word puzzles, or "jumbles", which people can solve quickly, and then sound out in their head.
Arranged in a higher difficulty ordering, the sentence would become difficult to un-jumble, and sounding out would be impossible. That is entirely plausible, and supported by the available research, especially the number of newspapers in circulation which feature a Jumble puzzle in or near the comics section. Ta-da, it's science!
There's an example in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/opinion/06hallinan.html It stretches the analogy perhaps too far, but the part about the music is pretty interesting.
Yup, that's true.
I don't know what it says about my skill as a reader, but I totally read that as "...recognize words by Snape" and was very intrigued until I RTFS.
Some idiocy here: it's not a rebuttal, but recognition that the brain uses multiple strategies. While I may surely recognize tokens (I'll pass on the issue of how that works), it is equally true that when I encounter a new symbol, having been trained early on in phonics, I do decompose the token into its elements, and resolve it in that fashion.
We've seen in so many areas how versatile the brain is, why on earth would we accept a story which posits a single mechanism? That smacks of a belief in the "whole word" teaching theory which has produced millions of functional illiterates.
--- Bill
Reading via word shape has been tested since the 80s: See "The Psychology of Reading" by Taylor & Taylor (1989), or read this: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition.aspx Apparently one part of the brain looks at global word shape, and another starts reading letters from the beginning and end of the word at the same time, and they both collectively converge on a mutually-consistent hypothesis. But word shape reading is faster and often pre-empts the local feature (letter) reading process.
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From wikipedia:
In his mind, he says, each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, colour, texture and feel. He can intuitively "see" results of calculations as synaesthetic landscapes without using conscious mental effort and can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and Pi as beautiful. The number 6 apparently has no distinct image yet what he describes as an almost small nothingness, opposite to the number 9 which he calls large and towering. Tammet has described 25 as energetic and the "kind of number you would invite to a party".Tammet not only verbally describes these visions, but has also created artwork, including a watercolour painting of Pi.
However, it needs to be noted that how good readers read is not necessarily the same as how people learn to read. (Programmers: Do you code the same way that you did when you were learning it? Or are there a few zillion shortcuts that are automatic now?) We may recognize words by shape, but the letters still represent speech sounds, and *learning* what they are is rather important for learning to read fluently. There are also different ways the brain is wired for different people (f'rinstance, when females are processing language, it tends to go to more parts of the brain than when men are processing language).
Back in 1965 I was given an Evelyn Wood Speed reading course as a high school graduation present. One of the main things that course taught was that you DO NOT have to hear the sound of words to understand their meaning. It is also possible to read lines backwards as well as forwards. Dot matrix printers could print that way, and I have been able to read that way for over forty years. One reason I HATED meetings and mismanagement training so much was that the data transmission rate was SO SLOW!
After I took the course I really didn't think I had learned anything or that the techniques worked. That is, until the next year at final exam time in collage when I was WAY behind in some courses. I managed to read the entire textbook twice the night before the final and pulled my grade up by two letter grades.
I used it at times during my career when I had to change technologies in a hurry. I could absorb enough in a weekend to at least be able to spot the sales weasels trying to pull a fast one the following week.
Although the course was taught as a way to read more fiction faster, I almost never used it for that. It was great for absorbing a lot of information very fast, but that is not the point of reading fiction and you loose almost all the real work that the author put into the piece.
I remember reading of research by British Ministry of Transport in the '50s or so that confirmed this and lead to the standard of writing road signs in upper/lower case and sans serif so that they could be read faster and from greater distance by drivers going quickly
When I learned morse code, I began to hear whole words. This is the same thing.
Interestingly enough this is how the Korean syllable clusters has been built up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hangeul_New_Version.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_placement_within_a_block
Maybe we should do like king sejong and assign a group of scientist the work to rebuild the latin alphabet and give them 30 years to come up with the most effective alphabet.
The more a read about linguistics I realize how scientific the hangul alphabet is built up.
Also tying back to the fine article, the syllable clusters makes it easier to memorize the shape of not just words, but also syllables.
Any short sighted person can attest to this. Seeing the length of a street name, and knowing the ratio of the font goes a long way to knowing whether you're at the right street. The good thing about this skill, is it can be used while driving.
I often think that our brains are simply pattern recognition engines. It might actually help in designing good computer pattern recognition - particularly for images - to progressively increase the resolution as close matches are found.
Example: Imagine you're looking at a nut on a bolt. A pattern recognition engine could be sped up markedly by first taking a low resolution snapshot of the nut and comparing it to a small library of basic shapes. It would see what could be a hexagon with a circle in it so it narrows its next search down to small subsection of the low resolution precursor images. Then it takes a medium resolution snapshot and explores the next few hundred medium resolution images, once again narrowing the search down to a small number of possibilities. Finally, a high resolution image is compared to the short list of high resolution images and the recognition engine will finally find a 100% match.
Tomorrow we'll probably have a story about a group of cartographers who have demonstrated that the flat earth theory is not true.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Those who naturally "speed read" or have learned the skill know that this is rule #1 of learning to read quickly. It's discussed in this book, and, of course, here.
According to your description, you have never experienced Samuel Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief". I can't be sure if that is your own fault or if you simply haven't read anything really good.
One should refrain from stretching this too far.
I type Chinese using an IME (Changjie) that, given some structured partial information about the appearance of any character, can produce almost uniquely the desired character. This is in contrast of replicating the character stroke by stroke as in handwriting.
After a couple of years of not writing Chinese by hand, I started to forget how to write some characters that I could type out, and finally I even needed consult a dictionary to type some characters I used to know quite well.
The paradox is that, if someone were to abuse their ability recognizing words in this way, where they only show themselves the shapes of words to read (as opposed to reading a properly typed/written word by recognizing its shape), in the long run they may eventually lose such ability.
As far as i was aware everyone already knew that the brain did not sound out words every time you read one.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I get pissed as well. It is bad enough in text messages and casual e-mails. I get this in correspondence from customers though. In important e-mail messages, such as them detailing changes they need made in an application or web site, it takes me forever to figure out what they actually want. I think it's rude and insulting.
The worst is when someone supplies a write-up for a web site in this garbage format. When you give someone an estimate based on the client providing the copy, you don't have time to fix this. These jobs are priced lower than jobs where we supply the copy writing. So, for these people, I started copying and pasting the copy just like they sent it. If they want me to rewrite it in real English ( in my case ), as well as spell check, and proof-read, then it goes beyond the estimate.
The research project is total rubbish being done to push a political agenda by disproving something that was never held to be true in the first place.
There have been decades of proper research on the issue. This is an old summary for anyone interested in proper research.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition.aspx
It's the same with reading music you learn to recognized common rhythmic patterns, same with chords voicings. Reading same thing you look at these simple words and just know them from a glance, you don't thing the letters and put it together. Even unfamiliar words you look for letter patterns first and piece together the words.
I am a bit dyslexic, though not enough to have much troubles. I have been reading words instead of letters for as long as I can remember. I must have changed it because I mess up the letters anyways. I do remember not understanding the reading lessons, and reading as one of the fastest in the class. After 2 years reading I was 4 years ahead of my fellow kids.
My sister is a bit more dyslexic than I am. She never learned to read words instead of letters (maybe due to being a bit more dyslexic. Dunno). She has had troubles reading for years. A couple of years back we talked about reading (and how it came to be I read so fast, while I had sort of the same troubles recognising letters). She must have tried to read in the same way, since she started reading for fun after a few months (she devoured the Harry Potter series).
I think it would be usefull for most children to try to read words instead of letters, although I do not have any clue about how the curriculum would be. I started reading words after I learned how to read letters (wich didn't work for me but may have given me enogh of a foothold to form words and build that database), but a more dyslexic kid may have to much troubles reading letters to get to words.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
It's the same with numbers!! Numbers, even strings of numbers are pictures and each invoke there own feelings. They stay embedded in memory that way.
Precisely. My distance vision isn't great even with glasses, but when I know the name of the road I'm looking for (even if I've never driven that way before), I know what the word is supposed to look like on the sign and I can recognize the pattern of letterforms long before I can "read" them clearly.
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
I think the same approach to reading makes reading ideogram based languages, such as Chinese and Japanese written using Kanji, particularly efficient. My (not scientifically tested) impression is that reading a simple sentence in Japanese is faster than in English (I'm a native English reader and no expert in Japanese).I guess reading Egyptian Hieroglyphs was similarly fast.
I find it amusing that we discuss it not on, say Georgian (one letter one sound) or German (a bit more complicated but still straightforwad) where I could remotely imagine someone reading it letter by letter, but on English speaking forum, how do you read word potato letter by letter? :)
It's pretty clear that we recognize entire words. But how does it prove that we still do NOT pronounce them, pretty please?
"I cnduo't bvleiee taht..."
What actually amazes me is that I immediatly recognized that there was a missing L...
It's also why certain words are constantly spelt incorrectly or mistaken for one another. Not only are the sounds of the variations similar, and sometimes the meaning, but so are the shapes. E.g., you don't see people mistake "they're" for "their", but you see people mistake "there" for "their" and vice versa all the time. Or for that matter, "then" and "than", "effect" and "affect".
And that's why nobody ever uses "your" for "you're", "loose" for "lose", or "to" for "too".
It seems like just a couple of weeks ago that I saw a research press-release claiming to refute the word-shape hypothesis. Can't find it now, though. No matter; when you simplify the question to its most basic level, the answer is "it's not that simple".
This has been known since at least the early1970's, there have been plenty of scientific studies made (at least in Northern Europe). One important point is that it is not the only way to be a fast reader and not all fast readers read this way.
As for dyslexia, there are several causes for dyslexia. The 60+ most common causes have already been studied thoroughly, the one mentioned in the article included.
Ironically, one very common cause of dyslexia, not dissimilar to the trait of fast readers mentioned in the article, make the person very fast in recognising visual patterns, but in a manner that don't play well with text set in Roman typefaces. The dyslectic is then very fast in mirroring or rotating shapes (inside their head), which is generally a very good survival skill, e.g. if you need to recognise dangerous bugs or snakes fast, have to recognise predators or prey at a long distance or camouflaged against the background, or for finding berries, nuts and herbs, but make it hard to distinguish between letterforms like "bpdq", "un", "AV" et c. in typical Roman typefaces. These kind of dyslectics always score very well on IQ tests, since those tests include several queries where this trait is useful. People with this kind of dyslexia can often be able to learn to read very fast in typefaces with very distinctive and unregular glyphs, e.g. MS Comic Sans, or 13th-17th century Blackletter Kurrent typefaces, some also to read well in typefaces where all the glyphs in words is interconnected and form one continuous shape (i.e. typefaces that mimic handwriting like secretary hand, chancery hand et c.). But then, most of those that already are fast readers of Roman typefaces can often learn to read the those kinds of typefaces even faster, i.e. Roman typefaces isn't very easy/fast to read for anyone.
They just call me "Annie."