19 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3
t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5615 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans
| Message 17 of 19 07 January 2012 at 7:37pm | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
There is no researcher, there is no research.
This is an urban myth -- note the lack of name, and the reference to "a Cambridge college" (which one?).
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Yes there was, here, again: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/raw linson.html
Rawlinson, G. E. (1976) The significance of letter position in word recognition.
Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6601 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 18 of 19 08 January 2012 at 1:37am | IP Logged |
Matheus wrote:
I think it only works with the Latin Alphabet. |
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Works with cyrillics too, well at least in Russian. I guess with the Finno-Ugric languages that use cyrillcs there would be the same problems as in Finnish. Though it's also due to a lack of consonant clusters and a regular spelling - if a word looks long, then it's long. In other languages words may look long in writing but have just 2-3 syllables. And also, the fact that double vs single letters are more than just spelling mistakes.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 19 of 19 09 January 2012 at 5:18pm | IP Logged |
t123 wrote:
Cainntear wrote:
There is no researcher, there is no research.
This is an urban myth -- note the lack of name, and the reference to "a Cambridge college" (which one?).
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Yes there was, here, again: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/raw linson.html
Rawlinson, G. E. (1976) The significance of letter position in word recognition.
Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK. |
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Sorry, I missed your links first time round as you hadn't made them clickable (there's an icon next to underline of the globe and a chain).
Two things:
1) Your first link quite soundly rubbishes the concept anyway.
2) there's a fundamental gap between the statement in the urban myth and Rawlinson's conclusions (which weren't even accepted by any peer-reviewed journal). All myths have origins -- it doesn't stop them being a myth.
In particular:
Rawlinson wrote:
Higher level units seem to be significant only for the beginnings and endings of words. |
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"Higher level units" are a very different thing from individual letters.
Consider:
The gosht tuhhogt it saw its sodhaw.
The mandsinersintug was plebiamtorc buesace it ddin't siut his dpiiistoosn.
In the first I broke up initial digraphs (digraphs being a "higher level unit" than letters) and in the second I broke up initial and terminal morphemes (another "higher level unit").
The difficulty this introduces is pretty clear -- and as I said, that's what his research seems to be about.
Rawlinson wrote:
My end model was of a multiple access system "allowing some direct use of features without precise letter identification, use of word length information, and some structuring of phonemic or syllabic units, as well as incorporating a sampling recognition system using letters or their attributes directly." |
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That's a far more complex reality than the urban myth version (or "internet meme", if you prefer) makes out. As I said, there's a lot of redundancy that this text takes advantage of, which is something pretty clearly implied by Rawlinson's own write-up. The internet version claims it's a simple system of "see letters -> see words".
Also, we have to take into account the age of Rawlinson's research -- Rawlinson probably wouldn't have access to much by the way of timing information. What eye/attention-tracking apparatus would have been available to a PhD student in the seventies? He certainly wouldn't have been able to perform brainscans to pinpoint recognition times with the accuracy of modern studies in the field.
So it's not unfair to say that it would have taken a fairly big increase in difficulty for the reader for him to even see it. This is not Rawlinson's fault, of course, but for 40-year-old research to be flying round without such a caveat isn't helpful....
Anyway, I'm glad to see that someone has looked closely at the origins of the myth, so thank you very much for providing the links. And again, sorry for not reading them the first time round.
Edited by Cainntear on 09 January 2012 at 5:21pm
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