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."

Comments

Yes

[tsa]

I always suspected that I read like that. I only have to spell words I don't know, or chop them up into syllables.

Re:Yes

[steelfood]

It also explains why we can just as easily read mispelt words where only some of the letters have been switched around. It's not which letters that get switched, but the resulting shape, that determines whether the word is easily readable or not.

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 at least for myself, the first few times I saw the word "prefect" in Harry Potter, I thought it said "perfect" and kept wondering why they were so arrogant.

Re:Yes

[CaptainPatent]

Easy Proof
Which is harder to read:

This first sentence which is typed correctly and is correctly formatted...

oR thIS SeConD seNTeNcE wHiCh yOU PrObaBLy doNT reCOgNiZe thE ShaPe oF?

Thanks to annoying people on facebook, I'm sure we all already knew this.

Re:Yes

[airfoobar]

That's not a very good proof, I don't think. By reading the first and last couple of characters of each word and measuring their relative lengths, I seem to read that without any trouble at all. A better test would be to remove the whitespace:

oRthISSeConDseNTeNcEwHiChyOUPrObaBLydoNTreCOgNiZethEShaPeoF?

Or even to insert wrong spacing:
oRth ISSe ConDseNTeNc Ew HiChy OUP rObaBL ydoNTreCO gNiZe thEShaP eoF?

This is news?

[Lispy]

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.

Re:This is news?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I've been reading since age 3 and read at 1500 wpm with 100% comprehension. I could have told them long ago that this is how I do it.

It's part of my autism.

Re:This is news?

[epine]

I've been reading since age 3 and read at 1500 wpm with 100% comprehension. I could have told them long ago that this is how I do it.

If you ask a group of people to self-assess for leadership skill, eighty percent report above average leadership skills. What seems to be happening is that each person defines leadership as heaps of whichever skill component he/she happens to possess, and not so much of the skill components he/she lacks. They are all telling the truth with respect to variable criteria.

So I'm wondering, does autism define "comprehend" the same way a non-autistic person does? I read about half that speed, and I don't feel limited by word recognition, but more by the multiple processes of figuring out where the author is coming from (or not, if the agenda is to apply lipstick to a mental vacuum). There are so many layers to discourse analysis it's hard to list them all.

"Comprehend" could mean retaining information points presented as fact. Or it could mean assigning the dribble of factoids into mental categories "pulled from ass", "brandishing urban legend", "regurgitated from recent popular news story", "manufactured in a pique of convenience", "seduced by right-thinking glean", "outright deception", etc. It's a lot of work when reading to man the airport scanner of psychological bogosity.

Furthermore, these assessments are fluid and tentative and require a large working reserve of rewritable storage. A model of the author as a reliable or unreliable human being is formed, if the assessment is to care enough to do the work.

This last effect is most obvious watching movies. I give weak passing grades to diverting films I couldn't care less about. If the movie gets just enough better that I start to care about what it might have been, that's when my harshest judgments are unleashed: I've entered into the punative "made me look" valley where I actually turn on the critical machinery--often to discover not entirely quickly enough that it was a false start. The subset of the movies that make me care and then reward the bother is where I start giving out decent scores.

Sometime when reading I turn the page, and go "ugh" inside and then feel the overwhelming urge to skip forward half a page or a whole page, or both pages. Then I go "how can you _know_ all this text is worthless in a tiny fraction of a second after the page flip?" So I go back and slog through it and sure enough, in the vast majority of cases, my instant assessment was right on the money.

Many of the long-winded essays linked from aldaily.com are particularly challenging in this regard. Some of those writers are talented enough to go on for page after page saying hardly anything at all, while defeating the immediate "this is vacuous crap" quick page-turn self defense. It appears that there is a high art to saying nothing in such an elaborate and convoluted way that busting the vacuity of the prose reduces me to my real-time reading speed.

I once read a piece, Kirkegaard I think, about chasing a bug around a desk with a pin while enduring immense boredom in the classroom. The humanities is where you learn to wield the pin, and make your reader perform as the bug. Not always, but fairly often. What to these people does the word "comprehend" actually mean?

Re:2nd Grade

[Crudely_Indecent]

I don't understand how they can latch onto the "sounding out" theory when there are so many examples of ancient cultures using hieroglyphs. There aren't any letters to sound-out in these ancient languages, yet the cultures that used them extensively didn't have problems understanding them.

Catching up with elementary school, what about catching up to the ancient Egyptians?

Re:Stupid Article is Stupid

[MozeeToby]

What's important is that this is finally becoming established fact. Hooked on Phonics (and its sibling programs used the nation over for the past 20 years) produced a load of kids (in my generation specifically) who could barely read aloud at half their speaking pace. Phonics is an important skill for anyone who is literate but we have dedicated hundreds of hours of education time to it when at least some of that time should have been going to sight based reading. It isn't the difference between fast and slow readers, it's the difference between being able to read, and being able to read and comprehend while you do so.

Incidentally, your scrambled words example is a great way to show that word shape is very important, more important than just "the first and last letters". Look at the believe. Scrambled as it is in your example the word shape is identical (bvleiee) but if you scramble it in a way that moves the tall 'l' around it's much harder to read (beivele). The text that went around the internet that you are quoting from is very carefully constructed to be as easy to read as possible. actually becomes aulaclty, according becomes aocdcrnig. There are other tricks used also, making sure that the trickier to decode words have lots of context, preserving multi-letter characters, preserving important syllables, etc. It's a neat piece of brain hacking, but it isn't quite what it's made out to be.