Neuroscience
Psychologists Denis Pelli and Katharine Tillman have shown that reading is a team effort in the sense that the three reading processes of letter decoding, whole world recognition, and using sentence context, each make a unique, additive contribution to reading speed.
Eleven participants read passages from the mystery novel Loves Music, Loves to Dance by Mary Higgins Clark. The researchers knocked out the contribution of the three reading processes, one at a time, or in combination, by manipulating the text, and observed the effect this had on reading speed. This is the first time all three processes have been studied at once in this way.
To knock out sentence context, they changed word order (e.g. “Contribute others. The of Reading measured”). To knock out whole word recognition, they alternated capital and lower case (e.g. “ThIs tExT AlTeRnAtEs iN CaSe”). And to knock out letter-by-letter decoding, they substituted letters in such a way that word shape was maintained (e.g. “Reading” becomes “Pcedirg”).
Letter decoding was found to account for 62 per cent of reading speed; whole word recognition 16 per cent; and sentence context 22 per cent. Crucially, while the influence of the different processes was additive, there was no redundancy. So when letter decoding was knocked out, the contribution of the other processes to reading rate didn't increase. That is, the three processes don't work on the same words. Speed reading proponents will be interested to note that among the faster readers, predicting words from sentence context made a bigger contribution to reading speed than among the slower readers.
“That letters, words and sentences are all involved in reading is nothing new, but finding that their contributions to reading rate is additive is startling” the researchers said.
_________________________________
Pelli, D.G. & Tillman, K.A. (2007). Parts, wholes, and context in reading: A triple dissociation. PloS one, 8, e680. (Open access).
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Link to speed reading discussion in Slate.
- Second Language Changes The Way Bilinguals Read In Their Native Tongue
Do bilinguals have an internal switch that stops their two languages from interfering with each other, or are both languages always "on"? The fact that bilinguals aren't forever spurting out words from the wrong language implies there's some kind...
- Cryptic Crosswords Impair Face Recognition
Solving cryptic crosswords impairs our subsequent ability to recognise faces, a finding that has obvious practical implications for the kind of activities eye-witnesses get up to prior to an identity parade. Michael Lewis at Cardiff University presented...
- Communicating Off The Top Of Your Head
Forget lip-reading, the way the top of the head moves as we speak also plays a part in communication, a finding that has implications for creating more realistic animated characters. In an initial experiment, Chris Davis and Jeesun Kim presented students...
- G R E A T E R / L E T T E R / S P A C I N G / Helps Reading In Dyslexia
Simply increasing the spacing between letters improves the reading ability of children with developmental dyslexia, according to a group of Italian and French researchers (Zorzi et al., 2012). Dyslexic children were 20% faster and twice as accurate when...
- The Writer Who Forgot How To Read
NPR has a cute little animation (via BoingBoing) about the story of writer Howard Engel. Engel suffered a minor stroke which left him unable to read words, but he could still write (and read what he wrote for a short period, before it faded into...
Neuroscience
Reading is a team effort
Psychologists Denis Pelli and Katharine Tillman have shown that reading is a team effort in the sense that the three reading processes of letter decoding, whole world recognition, and using sentence context, each make a unique, additive contribution to reading speed.Eleven participants read passages from the mystery novel Loves Music, Loves to Dance by Mary Higgins Clark. The researchers knocked out the contribution of the three reading processes, one at a time, or in combination, by manipulating the text, and observed the effect this had on reading speed. This is the first time all three processes have been studied at once in this way.
To knock out sentence context, they changed word order (e.g. “Contribute others. The of Reading measured”). To knock out whole word recognition, they alternated capital and lower case (e.g. “ThIs tExT AlTeRnAtEs iN CaSe”). And to knock out letter-by-letter decoding, they substituted letters in such a way that word shape was maintained (e.g. “Reading” becomes “Pcedirg”).
Letter decoding was found to account for 62 per cent of reading speed; whole word recognition 16 per cent; and sentence context 22 per cent. Crucially, while the influence of the different processes was additive, there was no redundancy. So when letter decoding was knocked out, the contribution of the other processes to reading rate didn't increase. That is, the three processes don't work on the same words. Speed reading proponents will be interested to note that among the faster readers, predicting words from sentence context made a bigger contribution to reading speed than among the slower readers.
“That letters, words and sentences are all involved in reading is nothing new, but finding that their contributions to reading rate is additive is startling” the researchers said.
_________________________________
Pelli, D.G. & Tillman, K.A. (2007). Parts, wholes, and context in reading: A triple dissociation. PloS one, 8, e680. (Open access).
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Link to speed reading discussion in Slate.
- Second Language Changes The Way Bilinguals Read In Their Native Tongue
Do bilinguals have an internal switch that stops their two languages from interfering with each other, or are both languages always "on"? The fact that bilinguals aren't forever spurting out words from the wrong language implies there's some kind...
- Cryptic Crosswords Impair Face Recognition
Solving cryptic crosswords impairs our subsequent ability to recognise faces, a finding that has obvious practical implications for the kind of activities eye-witnesses get up to prior to an identity parade. Michael Lewis at Cardiff University presented...
- Communicating Off The Top Of Your Head
Forget lip-reading, the way the top of the head moves as we speak also plays a part in communication, a finding that has implications for creating more realistic animated characters. In an initial experiment, Chris Davis and Jeesun Kim presented students...
- G R E A T E R / L E T T E R / S P A C I N G / Helps Reading In Dyslexia
Simply increasing the spacing between letters improves the reading ability of children with developmental dyslexia, according to a group of Italian and French researchers (Zorzi et al., 2012). Dyslexic children were 20% faster and twice as accurate when...
- The Writer Who Forgot How To Read
NPR has a cute little animation (via BoingBoing) about the story of writer Howard Engel. Engel suffered a minor stroke which left him unable to read words, but he could still write (and read what he wrote for a short period, before it faded into...