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Comment by agd | Hacker News Reader

In a way, I'm surprised I can read this so easily. Do our brains read by converting text to sounds, and then parsing the sounds?

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As a native English speaker, I found my self reading it and then having to back-track by a few words to say them aloud in my head to discern the intended meaning as it was the sound of the words that was important, not the meaning of the word shape. The second time I read it through it was much easier.

I had to explicitly read it "aloud" in my head, in a way that I don't do when reading other text. I can generally read text very quickly without having to hear it in my head, and in this case it was impossible.

I think many people do have brains that operate this way, probably because their understanding of language is grounded in conversation as a first experience. I suspect this is the reason you see confusion with "your, you're" and "there, their, they're."

I don't parse language in quite that manner, and even in speaking I have a different "mouth feel" for those homonyms. This creates a modest inversion of the idea of spelling errors for me, in that people who truly do say homonyms in such a way that to my hearing it is exactly the same require me to parse for context.

> I don't parse language in quite that manner, and even in speaking I have a different "mouth feel" for those homonyms.

I believe in the (somewhat controversial) non-subvocalization-based text processing and even think I do it myself, but I'm wondering if you could describe more about the "mouth feel" issue. Do you mean that you believe that you pronounce them using different phonology (that another person would potentially be able to hear), that your muscles are doing something different but not in a way that makes an auditory difference, or simply that you're subjectively aware of the spelling while speaking but not necessarily in a way that makes a physically-observable difference? Or is it not quite clear which of these is the case?

I think this is an interesting question in the philosophy of language and also in the psychology of reading. (I've thought about this myself but haven't studied the academic literature about it.) If your answer is the first one, I wonder if you'd be willing to make an audio recording of yourself pronouncing these words that might show what difference you experience.

By the way, there are documented cases where spelling differences have created new pronunciation differences that didn't previously exist in the spoken language. Maybe something like that has been happening in your idiolect?

I have a similar feeling, when I pronounce a homonym/homophone. The word "mouth feel" resonates for me, although I suspect that sometimes it's just an awareness of the spelling of the word. Other times, I'll consciously choose to pronounce a word differently to try to disambiguate it. I'll say "aunt" as "ant"/"ont" (read those second as phonetically-spelled Californian American pronunciations) depending on the situation and flow of the sentence. "They're" is usually "They-er", "their" is sometimes "thur" (like "fur" with a /ð/), and "there" feels like it's pronounced the expected way. "To" might be "tə", but "two" and "too" never are.

Of course, that's all when I'm paying close attention to what I say. I'm sure there are times that I go against those. Also, sorry for the mix of layman phonetic spelling and IPA.

Kind of a controversial issue whether this is always the case, but it's at least commonly or typically the case for many readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

Honestly it took me a minute before my brain started to be able to read it a lot better. At least it was very slow because everything is so wrong. So I don't know how common either of our experiences are but I am your contrary :)

Early reading is taught that way. You may have heard of "Phonics" as an element of literacy?

Full literacy in alphabetic-phonetic languages includes the steps of (1) no longer sounding out words aloud and (2) no longer sounding out most words in your head, but rather grasping the shape of the word immediately.

It's the jump from word-as-sound to word-as-symbol, which I think a lot of people never make, partially because it's not particularly useful in their lives.

I suspect those involved in programming skew very much towards the word-as-symbol, but whether that is causative or correlative I can't say.

I definitely belong to the word-as-symbol camp when reading in my native Norwegian. Besides, I am a programmer (A shoddy one in all but assembly language, though...)

Interestingly, perhaps, is that I recently made the transition from word-as-sound to word-as-symbol in another language - morse code; that felt very odd while it was going on - I have parsed words character by character for a couple of decades, and suddenly, I found my decoding lagging further behind - I had started hearing words as units, rather than composites of characters. Funnily enough, it was through no conscious effort - just happened, over the course of a few hours.

I was pondering the same thing; also, I wonder whether not being a native English speaker makes it easier or harder to read it - English is my third language and I found I could read it without any problems.

I think I've read somewhere that reading is basically done by the brain registering the first and last few letters in a word, then just checking whether the ones in the middle are more or less what you expect and where you'd expect them. (In other words - if the start and/or end of a word is altered, your reading speed and comprehension should take a nosedive compared to just messing with the letters in the middle)

If there is some truth to that, it would go a long way towards explaining why we can read it with as little trouble as we do.

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