ecn-pa.haamu (07/25/82)
Let me comment on this impressive statistic: ...children taught to read in a phonetic alphabet acquire 5th grade proficiency (by English standards) by the middle ov grade 2. (I trust I need not attribute the quote.) As a child I was pretty quick off the blocks; even without the aid of a phonetic alphabet I reached "5th grade proficiency" a year or two early. I had a particular talent for translating a group of orthographic symbols into what my elementary teachers (and, apparently, at least one anthropology professor) believed was the essence of a word: its sound. Unfortunately, I never put aside that talent. Even today I still hear every word inside my head as I read it, and I stumble along at about 250 words per minute. The irony is that I was trained for this disability-- by people, however well-intentioned, who mistakenly thought reading ought to be somehow phonetic. And as we all know from reading this newsgroup, the tradition lives on. The process I use to read, called "sub-verbalization" (or something like that) probably also afflicts most of you in one degree or another. It is precisely what speed-reading clinics try to drum out of you. One of these days I'm going to take one of their courses. (The trouble is, I'm still working my way through the brochures.) So if what we want is a nation of 5th-grade-level readers, then I say damn the torpedoes! Let's get on with phonetic spelling reform! Meanwhile, perhaps an entirely *non*-phonetic alphabet, while harder to learn, would provide the greatest benefit to adults. -- Mark Raabe
wagner (07/27/82)
I found Mark Raabe's comments very interesting, but I am not sure I understood them completely, and I wish he would explain himself in more detail if he has the time. My understanding was that speed-reading was much more related to a phenomenon called "chunking", and the goal of speed-reading was to increase the average size of a chunk. I am not sure how pronouncing the words when you are chunking at that level hurts anything. But maybe I missed the point. Chunking is a very interesting phenomenon. I suggest you look at "The Psychology of Computer Programming" by Weinberg - in the chapter on programming language design, the section on compactness. For the sake of continuity of the newsgroup, I will try to explain briefly what chunking is in a different context from Weinbergs. If there are linguists out there who know this material better than I, please rescue me from my ignorant mistakes. When you start to read, the largest unit of information you can handle is the letter. You look at a letter, try to remember what it is, and then say an appropriate sound (hard to do out of context with the rest of the word, which is what started this discussion, but lets leave that aside for a second). Then you go on to the next letter. Finally you get to the end of the word, and you have said a very letters, you rummage around in your mind for a word that can be mangled out of that loose collection of sounds. (sorry, .-2s/very/few/) Either you guess right, or the person helping you gives you a hint. With more experience, you have all the letters down pat, and you start to recognize common runs of letters (later you find out that most of these are called syllables). You recognize "th", "ph", "ough", etc, as having sound value quite independent of the sound values of the individual letters. You read faster because, rather than doing a look-up per character, you are doing a look-up per recognized dipthong(sp?) or syllable. Finally, you start to recognize whole words in one chunk. Your eyes scan the word all at once, you look it up and recall its pronunciation and meaning, all in one association. There will always be words so complex or rare or both, that we have to piece them out (remember the first time you saw antidisestablishmentarianism?) Most of us recognize some short phrases (with respect to, etc) as single chunks, but recognize the vast majority of words one at a time. When reading trashy novels, you can probably chunk whole phrases, because you can anticipate what sort of syrup phrases are going to be used, and the vocabulary is seldom difficult. You couldnt read a medical journal at the same speed, because so much of the vocabulary would be new (unless you do it all the time). My understanding was that speed reading was critically dependent on being able to chunk at larger granularity than single words. What is required is suppression of detail. We made the other transitions from letter to syllable to word. Why is the next transition harder? I dont know. Anyone out there got any ideas? This has been too long, sorry. Didnt realize that it would take me so much to explain. Hope I didnt bore you too much. Michael Wagner, UTCS