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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.
-- Cheers!
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?
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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!)
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 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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
For the exact same reason.
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.
There's a faint inner voice in my head that speaks words as I read them, or write them. I would imagine that my speech circuitry would light up on a brain scan, but maybe not as strongly or extensively as when I'm listening or speaking.
I'm a fast reader, and I read upside down pretty fast too (comes in handy from time to time), so I don't think I'm compensating for a lack of visual processing.
Especially for non-character based writing like Chinese.
Saying it's a non-character based language doesn't seem to be the way you want to phrase it. Most kanji have a couple of main pronunciations which you can pretty consistently figure out. The big difference from the Latin writing system and the Chinese writing system is that chinese characters also have a meaning assigned to them. (And words tend to be more compact) You can still write out things fully phonetically in Chinese Characters. But with the Harry Potter books, the translators went to some lengths to not only phonetically copy the names, but to also pick the right hanji to add additional meaning to the names. Eg Voldemort's chinese name includes the character for 'evil' in it, but still sounds similar to the english name (Fudimo).
A detail look at the name translation can be seen here.
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.
read subjects.
I'm an auditory person. I mentally "hear" every word as if someone is speaking. It happens more quickly than people are generally capable of speaking, but I still run the mental auditory pathway for every word. It's simply how I'm accustomed to processing written text, and how I remember that text most easily. Coincidentally, it also means that I often can't remember if read a piece of information or heard it in an audio file or video.
My other sig is clever.
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.
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.
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...
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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.