4 ms·

> Another aspect / problem: humans vocalize (well, adults, usually, using their "inner voice") anything they read. Not necessarily, e.g.: > Hurlburt … estimat

by bradrn 3y ago

> Another aspect / problem: humans vocalize (well, adults, usually, using their "inner voice") anything they read. Not necessarily, e.g.: > Hurlburt … estimates that inner monologue is a frequent thing for 30 to 50 per cent of people. [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-experience-science-1.5486969 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-...] For myself, I rarely read out Haskell code ‘literally’ (to the extent that I read any code literally at all; I’m not sure I have much of an internal monologue). Instead I tend to perceive it at a higher level: say, ‘modify a state variable s to fromMaybe s (f s)’ for ‘modify $ \s -> fromMaybe s (f s)’. Reading it out character-by-character would be as pointless as reading an ordinary word that way, like reading ‘cee-aye-tee’ instead of ‘cat’.

crabbone 3y ago
I forgot the name of the reseacher, it was one of Chomsky's students who also researched how people (learn to) understand music. He also researched the subject of reading comprehension in people who lost hearing at different stages of their lives. His research convinced me that any tool that wants to parse any spoken language absolutely has to incorporate vocalization information. Also, it convinced me that while it's possible that some people (esp. deaf from birth) can learn alternative ways of reading that don't involve vocalization, these are unnatural for humans, hard to learn and have poorer yield. So, yeah, maybe some people don't read their code out loud to themselves, but most do, and for most of those who do this makes things easier. So, even if there's a way around it, it's not worth considering when we are talking about ease. People who don't do it are "playing with a handicap", they aren't in the competition for the easiest way to do things. Also, I'm not convinced that having an internal monologue is the same as reading text using inner voice. Most people learn to read by first reading out loud, and only later learning to use inner voice. Only few people continue on to learn advanced reading techniques which allow to skip selectively and to perform some other mental manipulations on the text, but these techniques also often involve some internal vocalization, but it wouldn't produce the equivalent of speech. More like how people who have to control their computer with voice commands learn all kinds of shortcuts / ways to invoke functionality hard to describe using regular speech elements with clicking noises, whistles etc.

by bradrn 3y ago

crabbone 3y ago

I forgot the name of the reseacher, it was one of Chomsky's students who also researched how people (learn to) understand music. He also researched the subject of reading comprehension in people who lost hearing at different stages of their lives. His research convinced me that any tool that wants to parse any spoken language absolutely has to incorporate vocalization information. Also, it convinced me that while it's possible that some people (esp. deaf from birth) can learn alternative ways of reading that don't involve vocalization, these are unnatural for humans, hard to learn and have poorer yield. So, yeah, maybe some people don't read their code out loud to themselves, but most do, and for most of those who do this makes things easier. So, even if there's a way around it, it's not worth considering when we are talking about ease. People who don't do it are "playing with a handicap", they aren't in the competition for the easiest way to do things. Also, I'm not convinced that having an internal monologue is the same as reading text using inner voice. Most people learn to read by first reading out loud, and only later learning to use inner voice. Only few people continue on to learn advanced reading techniques which allow to skip selectively and to perform some other mental manipulations on the text, but these techniques also often involve some internal vocalization, but it wouldn't produce the equivalent of speech. More like how people who have to control their computer with voice commands learn all kinds of shortcuts / ways to invoke functionality hard to describe using regular speech elements with clicking noises, whistles etc.