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: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.