Only the actual sound production is slow; the mental preliminaries, which are what is involved here, are as fast as any other mental event - including comprehension of read words.
How is this known? or are you guessing?
Wow. All of the linguistic articles I've read insist that Flemish satifies the defintion of a "dialect" of Dutch--that the two are mutually comprehensible, instantly for many people. Were you not able to understand spoken Flemish before you started studying it? We're told that the reason Flemish is sometimes called a separate language is strictly politics, to bring more attention to the Flemish separatist movement in Belgium. I'm assuming you're fluent in Dutch, from your other posts.
Somewhere on SciForums is posted the experiment on this topic. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. We are able to read words with the correct first and last letter; all the ones in between can be scrambled as long as they are present and correct.
Our speech center is much faster than our vocal apparatus. I've read that people have no trouble understanding recorded English played back with digital equipment at 250wpm, with the correct pitch and the phoneme durations individually adjusted so that all can be heard. I don't know what the upper limit is.Oli said:
Well my whole point was that we no longer move our mouths. The question is whether we process the words through our vocal center, silently.
I'm guessing you learned Spanish when you were an adult or older adolescent? I had my first class when I was 11 and I read it the same way I read English and at the same speed. I suppose I'm fluent in Spanish by my own rating system, at least 7.5 with a vocabulary of at least 6,000 words. And I'm fluent by the only other rigorous definition I've seen: I know I think in Spanish because I have dreamed in Spanish.
Yes, but I would think that completely bypassing the speech center and having some other method of reading could have an effect on the way we understand and react to the sentences. I'd like to explore this with the people who have said they don't form sound images mentally. I just have no idea what questions to ask.
Yes, but I would think that completely bypassing the speech center and having some other method of reading could have an effect on the way we understand and react to the sentences. I'd like to explore this with the people who have said they don't form sound images mentally. I just have no idea what questions to ask.
I'm not exactly saying that we "need" it. You've proven that we don't, since at least some portion of the human race is apparently perfectly capable of reading without it. I'm only saying it's also apparent that a great many of us "use" it and can't conceive of a way to read without it.
Check out my links, that I included with that post, for two sources.billy said:
I would guess the only place you could find a set of people who reliably read without activating the sound processing areas of their brains would be among the congenitally deaf. As far as speakers claiming they don't - I read very fast, and could easily overlook the aural/oral registration symbiosis that accompanies my reading of a word if I were not deliberately and with difficulty aware that a set of rhyming or doggerel syllables will stand out if present, that consonants with similar vocal production mechanisms will more often pass unnoticed in typos than consonants with much different ones, that even very bad misspellings are often easily read (the sound registers, rather than the visual image), that for me tongue twisters are harder to read than more easily pronounced prose, etc.fraggle said:
Pandaemoni said:
Well naturally I can't find my source and will have to keep looking.
I shouldn't malign Plato and Cicero. My own hypothesis is that by learning to read when we were all six years old (or five for you kids who all had mandatory kindergarten, we got an extra year of carefree childhood insteadPandaemoni said:
) we were able to develop a cognitive skill that people who learn later in life simply cannot. After all, all learning abilities related to language tend to drop off markedly in late adolescence for most people--that's why we scream at American parents to enroll their children in foreign language classes so when the Chinese take over the world economy they'll have an easier time with Chinese.I seem to recall that the references were oblique. For example, an abbot could tell whether his monks were doing their work and reading, because if they were daydreaming their lips would not be moving. I'll keep looking.
I didn't mean to imply that I regard people who don't subvocalize as more intelligent than the rest of us. (Perish the thought!) Simply that they may respond to what they read differently from the rest of us because the way they read is different.
I read once that Gaius Marius used to speak out loud as he read while Gaius Julius Caesar read quickly in his head.
I think I read that somewhere too. You can still find Chinese written both ways, as well as top to bottom. Direction wasn't always as important as it is in the age of printing and computers. As someone pointed out on another thread, it's more important to the writer than to the reader, having to do with the particular writing tool as well as right- or left-handedness. I find it trivial to read mirror images, and I'm sure most of us who work in offices have long ago developed the ability to read upside down from the papers on our boss's desks. Now I'm not sure I could do it so easily in Spanish, and I can't really do it at all in a non-Roman alphabet.
I'm not actively learning han zi, which tells you which language I studied.
I took a class in Mandarin almost forty years ago, and we learned a few characters but the emphasis was on conversation. Since then I've hung out with a lot of Chinese people (easy to do in L.A., even in those days), learned more words and became fluent in what I know. I had a girlfriend from Sichuan for a couple of years and I got her to speak Chinese around the house to help me, whenever practical. So I tend to speak with a Sichuan accent, or Shicuan as they say. I rate myself in the low 6's on my scale. I can probably write a few dozen characters and read a hundred or two, not really enough to even figure out what a store sells from its sign. I'm too old to bother learning more now. The Chinese will adopt a phonetic writing system before I learn to read the bare minimum 1,200 of what they've got.
I suspected that a foreigner might learn to read kanji without even knowing how the words are pronounced. Same for Hebrew without the vowels.
If I remember what I read in a recent article correctly, that would almost qualify you as "literate" in China. I think people with four years of elementary school are assumed to know 1,200 characters, and that's the standard they use for their national literacy statistics. That way they get to count millions of people in rural areas who had four years of school but don't keep in practice so they are now in fact illiterate. That's the advantage of an alphabet, you only have to remember a couple of dozen characters. I wonder whether anyone has ever lost the ability to read English or any language with a phonetic alphabet, simply from lack of practice.
I wonder if anybody who moves his lips while he reads ever learned to type.
Uh oh, I probably just set us up for a scroll of "blonde jokes."
Heisig's is the best method for learning the meaning for sure.So do you mentally hear the English words while reading them?
I learned to read Greek a while ago but know virtually no vocabulary. I think I can still read it phonetically (slowly) but I've forgotten the few exceptions to phonetic pronunciation. They might take a few minutes to relearn.
Sure. I only run across something in the Hebrew alphabet every few years but I can still decipher it. One girl I ran into on the sidewalk looked at me askance when she saw me staring at her t-shirt. But then when she noticed my lips moving she smiled and stood still, while I puzzled out "University of Jerusalem" and filled in the missing vowels.
yes, unless I know the Japanese word then I would mentally hear the Japanese word and somewhere else the meaning (for example "white car") would be simultaneously occurring.