[Fwd: Re: How do we read?]
"
I found it hard *not* to think about it, at least on some level.
agreed
It'd be interesting to see just how that study was laid out. One thing I
learned was that reading doesn't take in a word at a time, but phrases.
Well, yes and no. It isn't phrases so much as it is chunks of a line. The eyes move across the page in saccades (sp???) or short jumps, and they take in a few words, typically, but not necessarily a grammatical phrase.
Your
eye jumps to discrete points on the page. And one thing that's very
important in recognizing words is word shape (which is one reason why all
caps is harder to read).
Right on both counts.
About halfway through reading that paragraph, I realized that I was
recognizing words, but that I was stopping on many of them to figure out
what they said. To me, it was an increase in cognitive load.
Me, too.
One of the problems of rearranging internal letters is that it can change
the word shape. For me, while I could anagram all the words as written on
the fly, it certainly took me longer. From this study of one, I'd say that
while I can agree with the English university study conclusion that the
words can be read, the effort to do so, on both a conscious and an
unconscious level seems to be increased.
I think part of what the results demonstrate is that we rely on redundancy in reading as much as in hearing. We do a running probability calculation of what the next word is likely to be. When you are reading a magazine article and the page ends in mid-sentence, you've got a pretty good idea what word you're going to see when you turn the page, right? While we can string words together into unique sentences at will (all of us, every waking minute can do this), the next word that is going to be uttered or written comes from a fairly small set of possible words. So in reading the garbled text, we're not just looking at word shape; and we're not just looking at first and last letters; but we're combining the information about first and last letters with the information about what words are possible or likely in this situation.
Anyway, that's my Friday analysis.
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