Monique said:
Odd. I don't consider myself to be a "visual" person, but I read
crazy-fast.
Me too, on both counts. (Aside: I wish that technical writers could get it
into their damnably small heads that illustrations are for /illustration/ --
diagrams should supplement text, not replace it!)
Now that I think about it, though, this makes sense. I don't sound
out words that I read; the words do produce a sort of image in my
head, but I don't think it's necessarily visual. Maybe the word
"impression" is better than "image."
[...]
I wonder, though. Don't we all initially learn to read by sounding
out words? Why/how do some people transition to other strategies?
I learned by reading aloud, and then learned to read by "speaking" internally
(I can still remember the moment of inspiration when I realised that I didn't
actually have to /say/ anything). I quickly changed to "speed reading"
(probably in less than a year). For me reading feels like language -- in just
the same way as we don't hear sounds (in our native tongues) and /then/
understand them, I don't see text and then understand it as a consciously
separate process. The text /is/ the meaning, with no intermediary steps. I
guess users of sign-language feel the same way -- the /medium/ is visual, but
the /content/ is pure meaning, not speech-encoded-visually. (Is it possible to
learn to read before learning to speak, I wonder ? If so then a "slow hearer"
would transcribe sounds into signs in their heads, whereas the rarer "speed
hearers" would just understand the sounds directly.)
As to why some people end up reading like that, I have no real idea. Practise
must be a big part of it. In my own case I suspect the tendency was amplified
by what otherwise would have manifested as a very mild dyslexia. By absorbing
info "chunked" more coarsely, and (I speculate) using slightly different
processing pathways in the brain, I learned (unconsciously) to side-step the
problem, and became an apparently "advanced" reader. The downside is that my
spelling and ability to proof-read my own words is lamentable, and always has
been.
Incidentally, but not too far off-topic (for the newsgroup, if not for this
thread ;-) mangled identifiers like abbreviations and that ghastly "Hungarian"
convention /really/ throw off my ability to read. Perhaps for people who "read
aloud inside" the mangling has little effect, but I can't read the things at
all. I worked for half a year on a codebase that made heavy use of Hungarian,
and by the end of it I was no nearer being able to read that code than at the
start. The same point applies to people who post in "text-ese" -- if you read
8 as the sound "ate" then you'll be able to decode h8 easily (or rather, with
no more difficulty than you would when reading real English), but for folk like
me, h8 is no more meaningful than, say, h7. I hardly ever event try to read
such posts, a simple 'u' for you is enough to put me off.
[...] for some languages, the written
word is pictograms (is that the right word?) ... so I wonder, how are
young Chinese children taught to read? Surely they don't "sound out"
the words?
Slightly related to that: I've seen it claimed (in a plausible context -- i.e.
not the Web or a "pop science" page in a magazine) that Chinese people suffer
less from dyslexia than Westerners, with the associated speculation that the
underlying brain differences do occur in Chinese folk, but that they have less
effect on reading ability. OTOH, I've also seen the claim (in the same
reputable context) that that's tosh.
I have also seen the claim (reputable) that Chinese readers read much faster
(on average) than English readers -- presumably because they /have/ to
speed-read/flash-read (as we would call it).
BTW, I think the word you want is not "pictogram" (which is restricted to the
case where the sign is an genuine picture), but "logogram" or "logograph" (a
sign for a word).
-- chris
