Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Is this game working in other languages?

 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room Post Reply
19 messages over 3 pages: 1 2
t123
Diglot
Senior Member
South Africa
https://github.com/t
Joined 5422 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?).



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Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6408 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.
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.
1 person has voted this message useful



Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 5822 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?).



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Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK.

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.

"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."

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



2 persons have voted this message useful



This discussion contains 19 messages over 3 pages: << Prev 1 2

If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.1875 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.