

The Science of Word Recognition - swombat
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition.aspx

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andrewcaito
Reminds me of this chain email I've received many times
<http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp>

The most interesting part of reading this article was learning of the gap
between established scientific knowledge and standard typographic practice.
From the author's conclusion: "During my first year with the (ClearType) team
I gave a series of talks on relevant psychological topics, some of which
instigated strong disagreement. At the crux of the disagreement was that the
team believed that we recognized words by looking at the outline that goes
around a whole word, while I believed that we recognize individual letters. In
my young career as a reading psychologist I had never encountered a model of
reading that used word shape as perceptual units, and knew of no psychologists
who were working on such a model. But it turns out that the model had a very
long history that I was unfamiliar with."

~~~
eru
I wonder whether word recognition works differently for different languages.

E.g. more phonetic writing systems could tend to encourage looking at letters
instead of the whole word. Or, do Chinese people read at the level of strokes
or at the level of symbols or some other level?

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joblessjunkie
"...fast eye trackers and computers ... perform clever text manipulations
while a reader is making a saccade."

What a diabolical way to test the brain's reading patterns: strategically
switch around the text when the eyes move! Blew my mind.

~~~
eru
We should find a way to make a cheap DIY version with a web cam.

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swombat
From: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665833>

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long
This is great; thanks!

