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I can't find a quick reference now, but is long known that when we read - at least the educated and well-read adults -, we don't actually go for each individual
by ccozan 11y ago
I can't find a quick reference now, but is long known that when we read - at least the educated and well-read adults -, we don't actually go for each individual letter, but we read word shapes and recognize them faster. Fast readers can even compress this recognition for two, three or more words at a time, reading in like flashes.
It takes some training and there are somebooks that exploit this to make you a fast reader.
- DanBC 11y agoWe know that trying to teach children to read using this method is pretty terrible.
- PeCaN 11y agoIt's almost like training a recurrent neural network, you get the best results if you teach them letter-by-letter and let them work out the structure themselves.
- ccozan 11y agoBut I never implied that this is for children. Once we reach a certain age, and we are/were avid readers we "skip" reading the letters. Children cannot yet do this, of course, it takes training.
- azernik 11y agoOne great experimental demonstration is these chain letters going around with all the letters in each word but the first and the last scrambled up - you can still read it at a good fraction of normal speed. What's interesting to me is that this high-level processing can make it into conscious awareness before the lower-level features involved (not letters, but at least shapes and colors - which came after reading in this case).