![]() The frequency issue could be solved by giving every word in a large dictionary a frequency score, and if the program encounters words not found in the dictionary, a "Best guess" frequency score could be arrived at by length, presence or absence of cognate words, number of syllables, etc. It seems to me that these problems could be addressed by this sort of software. I'm mostly a lurker but nothing gets me going more than words. Source: I am a psycholinguist who researches sentence processing during reading in a big US university. But unfortunately that's not what reading is about for many people. These are three reasons why comprehension is not the same when speed reading and partially explain the uncomfortably sensation that occurs when the speed is too fast but we still seem to be understanding some of what we're reading: language is a redundant phenomenon and if you miss a word or two, or even a sentence, you will still get the gist. This is because we are not processing the meaning of a sentence at a constant speed throughout our "reading session". Sometimes we pause to understand a sentence or a paragraph and sometimes we just power through. You can't do this with RSVP and you end up going forwards without actually understanding the sentence completely.Ĭomprehension is not linear. ![]() ![]() Ambiguous sentences or sentences that are more complex require more work on your part to understand because you have to tie together all of the syntactic relations between the words in order to take home the meaning of the sentence. Regressing - or going back a few words- is the best strategy to get "unstuck" when reading. This software presents words at a fixed speed, limiting your ability to spend little time (or skip) words that are easy for you and spend a little longer on words that are more challenging to ensure that you have appropriately accessed that word in your mental lexicon Word frequency depends on your exposure to words and you become a faster reader the more you read (the more exposure you have to low frequency words). Words you encounter often are easier for you to recognize and integrate into the sentence than words that you encounter rarely. The amount of time you spend fixating on each word is a function of the frequency of that word. This way of presenting words is commonly called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) and it has some significant disadvantages due to the fact that reading text horizontally with the possibility of regressing (looking back a few words) is how we maximize our comprehension. Late to the party but this is a topic I know a lot about, so I'll give it a stab.
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