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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."
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.
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?
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. . .
"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."
I hate to break it to you but if this is the case then you're not actually reading....
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.
That teaching method was originally introduced in the 1960s as "Look Say". It was part of the general ideological overhaul of public education, of which the "New Math" was also a part. It all sprang from Russel et. al.'s philosophy of Behaviorism, which pointed away from man-the-rational and towards man-the-animal. Hence reading by memorization rather than by rational system (phonics).
Since then it has been discredited and so it had to change its name, I think it's called "Whole Language" now. It still competes with Phonics. This new research suggests the reason why Look Say is not the total failure that I and others predicted. However, it has a bit of difficulty explaining why (as others in this thread have pointed out) we can so easily read words whose internal letters are jumbled, so long as the first and last letters are correct.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
And another thing: English is not my native language and I know a lot of English words I have never heard. Yet I can read them no problem. Another fact in favor of the theory in the article.
I am a native speaker and I've learned many words in writing before I learned them in speech. As a result, some of my pronunciations are nonstandard. I pronounce "comparable" as if it were "compare" + "able", even though the standard way is irregular, "comp" + "arable". I tried to pronounce these words from how they were written before I'd heard them.
I don't know why this is even up for debate. If you look at any ideogram languages, you can't just sound out each word. Especially Chinese, where there are character that sound the same but have different characters. Or even the same character can be read differently depending on context. You definitely memorized the shape. The article is definitely right that we must be storing a visual dictionary of sorts. If we had to sound out each word, then ideogram languages would have never been invented, too inefficient.
But this also doesn't mean that you don't also associate shapes to sounds. The reason you pronounce it like "compare" + "able" is because you associated the shape "compare" to its sound and "able" to its sound. When put together, it would come out as "compare" + "able". This doesn't prove that you sound out the words as you see them. However, English is a language that runs on syllables, and "compare" is a multiple syllable word, so it gets broken up in the official pronunciation of the word comparable.