cl@lgc.com (Cameron Laird) (04/03/91)
In article <1991Apr2.162821.21318@leland.Stanford.EDU> rick@hanauma.stanford.edu (Richard Ottolini) writes: . . . >>that is, that people can scan information presented >>in a visual image-based form FASTER than in a plain >>textual form. > >I don't know if this is relevant to your inquiry, but Chinese speed readers >claim peak speeds about five times that of alphabetic readers. The fastest >I heard from Chinese in soc.culture.china was 50,000 characters per minute >and for English 5,000 words a minute. On the average a Chinese word >is two characters. >Chinese characters are more visual than alphabetic words. However, alphabetic >speed readers see the whole word at time, rather the characters, so they can >claim to be reading icons too. Chinese characters have the same horizontal >width in contrast to alphabetic words, so readers of the later may slow down >in predicting where the next word is. Funny: I just came across this claim for the first time a couple of days ago, andin a completely dif- ferent context. What do professional linguists say on the subject? It surprised me a LOT when I saw it, because rapid reading can only be of what I'll call "internalized" tokens; if you're treating them as icons, then you're doing time-consuming cognitive processing. Is the whole curve shifted? Do "average" Chinese and Japanese literates read five times as fast as their Latin-alphabet counterparts? Why hasn't this come out in all the fuss about national models of public-school education (that is, why hasn't it come to my attention)? This seems like a subject that admits good, interesting experiments; have they been done? -- Cameron Laird USA 713-579-4613 cl@lgc.com (cl%lgc.com@uunet.uu.net) USA 713-996-8546