Mike,
I think that experiments of the sort you suggest would merely show that
sometimes the comprehension phase as whole may take longer if the
stimulus is more difficult to grasp. It doesn't say anything about the
speed of the coding phase. On the contrary, I would expect that
misapplied code would have no effect on the speed of the coding phase;
rather, it's output would contain a lot of gaps which are then to be
filled by the inferential phase and this one may then take longer.
Also, I think one needs to be careful about the examples from spelling:
it seems that children learning difficult orthographies like the English
one primarily along the whole-word method; this may be one reason why
people may recognise words simply by their first and last letter. That
is, the graphological coding is per whole word. I wonder if the same
results will obtain in languages like Estonian (and maybe Turkish) where
the spelling is much more phonological and the learning method tends
more to a letter-based approach.
Best,
Christoph
--------------------------------------------------
Christoph Unger
SIL Internation (www.sil.org)
-----Original Message-----
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2006 02:24:49 +0100
Subject: RT list: Comprehension and decoding
From: Mike Sangrey
To: Relevance
On a blog, Scot McKnight posted something we've probably all seen:
> From Michael Russell, who hails from College Station, TX:
>
> I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
> The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at
> Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn?t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a
> wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat lttee be
> in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll
> raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not
> raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
> yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs
> psas it on !!
Scot went on to note in a comment:
> One of my friends read his entire dissertation backwards, word by
> word, in order to find spelling errors.
I replied (edited for this list), wondering the following (which is why
I'm posting here):
> Sperber and Wilson (aka Relevance Theory) and also Diane Blakemore
> tell us that the mind constructs meaning via two separate but
> connected processes. One is decoding and the other is inference. The
> example you gave in this posting focuses on the decoding phase.
> However, your friend?s insightful effort assumes the later phase is
> the more effective guide to the reader to determine what comes next.
>
> I?ve wondered if any cognitive linguist has produced writings scaled
> along a cline of comprehensibility with the writings misformed as per
> the example used above. These writings could then be given to
> volunteers who are simply told, "Read the words as quickly as you
> can." Then the researcher would graph relative comprehensibility
> against time.
>
> That is, I wonder if the decoding phase slows down when the
> inferencing phase also slows down. Or to say it another way, if the
> text is difficult to comprehend, then we have greater difficulty
> decoding. All in all, I think this would show that the mind naturally
> gives priority to coherence.
I would be interested in any insight from any one on this list. Have
there been any studies showing that difficulty in inference slows down
decoding? If inference guides decoding, wouldn't that imply (mean?)
that coherence is a precondition to the reader proximally obtaining the
original authorial intent?
Thank you.
--
Mike Sangrey (msangrey AT BlueFeltHat.org)
Exegetitor.blogspot.com
Landisburg, Pa.
"The first one last wins."
"A net of highly cohesive details reveals the truth."
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