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A study by Rainer et al. (2011) has shown that words are skipped and apparently filled in mentally quite often (in the order of 8 to 30% of times).
Two important factors that increased skipping rates were the length of the word and the predictability of the word due to contextual constraints. Both cases apply on the word 'the', because it is short and ...
9
There doesn't seem to be much research on this, but based on my review of the research it appears that deaf people are generally slower readers than non-deaf readers - but that this may be affected by age. Essentially they may start as slower readers but become faster readers when they are older. See the evidence I found below:
Conrad, Richard. "The reading ...
9
Unofficially, it has been called "illusion of expectation" by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, the guys famous for the Invisible Gorilla experiment.
Technically it falls under inattentional blindness (or perceptual blindness):
... the event in which an individual fails to recognize an unexpected
stimulus that is in plain sight.
8
Multiple causes of not reading instructions
As @crash notes, there are likely many explanations for not reading instructions.
It may be motivated by not caring about task performance. And such dispositions may be specific to the particular task or setting, or they might be partially related to some general disposition of the individual in terms of ...
8
In his 2003 psycholinguistics book, John Field has summarized (pp. 70-72) his own typing errors and combined them with an older corpus of Hotopf.
Missing words were among the frequent errors, but alas no numerical frequencies are given.
But what he says he noticed is that short function words like "are" or "it" (these are his examples) ...
7
The short answer is that it is not necessarily easier to read black on white. Contrast is more important in lightness and colour, it just so happens that black and white is the highest contrast. So its no accident that most books are in black and white. There is a plethora of research on perceptual processing which is easily found on google scholar if you ...
7
There are various reasons why this question is interesting for cognitive science research. Examples:
Children's programming is more violent and features more death than adult programming. Children's first exposure to the concept of death is often in fiction. Nonetheless, we know little about the meaning of death of fictional characters to children.
...
6
vand den Bos et al (2002)
van den Bos et al (2002) summarises research over various ages.
They reported:
The reading task was to read in 1 min, as fast and accurately as
possible, the unique and unrepeated words of a stan- dardized
word-reading test. Results indicate that word-reading speed and naming
speeds of colors and pictures continue to ...
6
In japanese language, kanjis are more than phonemes but represent an idea. For instance, both tree and spirit have the same sound (ki) and can be written with the hiragana "letter" き. But when kanjis are used tree is 木 while spirit is 気.
Therefore, it is possible to read without subvocalizing. We can read as if it was graphics.
So, when using kanji is much ...
5
Short answer
Higher contrast increases readability.
Background
In a series of papers under the umbrella "Psychophysics of Reading" (link is to first paper in the series of five) the authors investigate parameters that affect readability in normally sighted folks, as well as people with impaired vision. These studies seem particularly relevant to your ...
5
I think what Einstein had in mind is that in order to come up with original ideas one must keep a balance between knowledge and creativity, as already stated by Jeromy Anglim.
In a paper titled "The Composing Process and the Academic Composing Process" written by Stephen Krashen, Krashen says:
Although there is no empirical research on this hypothesis, ...
5
The short answer is we don't know for sure. Look up "alexia" and "agraphia"; pinpointing the regions of the brain that, if damaged, interfere with reading might give some indication of the cortical regions involved.
Visual cortex (back of the brain) is obviously necessary for the general population, but it's clearly possible for blind people to learn to ...
5
Interesting question! A related phenomenon called the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) suggests that the human cognitive system has a systematic weakness in this kind of evaluation--I believe the classic example is asking people if they know how a helicopter works (most people say yes), and then asking them to explain how a helicopter works (very few ...
5
Consider this, communication is more than 50% nonverbal. Studies vary (from 93% nonverbal to 75%) and the actual percentage is difficult to interpret, but it is generally accepted that most of the communication is nonverbal.
That being said, a book is only written word and content, whereas a lecture is dynamic, versatile, and incorporates much of the ...
5
I have tried speed reading myself in the past. From the research papers I have read back then, it seemed like there is no basis or evidence to the claim that with practice, reading speed can increase to more than 600-700 words per minute without any loss of comprehension (Some of the most bizarre claims include 25,000 words per minute. I would have been more ...
4
This question is open to some amount of opinion as there can be differences due to education level of the person reading the material etc. However, there was a study by the American military in order to make their technical manuals as easy to read as possible. The study was started by Rudolf Flesch with his Reading Ease evaluation, known as the Flesch ...
4
Short answer
Paraphrasing indeed negates the spacing effect observed in learning, because it causes mass repetition to be as effective as spaced repetition. The confusion is that paraphrasing does not degrade spaced learning, instead it improves the effectiveness of learning through mass repetition up until the level of spaced repetition.
Background
...
3
There is no scientific proof that being read at an adult age enhances reading speed.
However, slow readers read faster when the format of a document is enhanced. Is your partner more responsive to a specific background color, a particular contrast or a particular font? Such visu-attentional factors play a fundamental role in our ability to read.
You may ...
3
Einstein might have a fair point of view in this manner. He presumably is pointing out the balance between reading and creative thinking. too much reading causes people to not question critically and refrain from interpreting ideas in their own unique way, whereas reading and learning at your own rate and time can lead to more promising ways of understanding ...
2
In response to the First Question Only:
Does research support this observation that reading from paper results in less [eye]strain ...?
This study which seemed to be focusing on finding an objective measurement of eye strain does seem to show that reading from paper does result in less eye strain than reading from a VDT.
Objective evaluation of eye ...
2
Your initial intuition, that eliminating subvocalization makes understanding more difficult, seems to be consistent with empirical evidence. Slowiaczek and Clifton (1980) investigated the effect of eliminating subvocalization on reading comprehension, and concluded the following.
In these experiments, reading for meaning was severely impaired when ...
2
Charles Fletcher, one of my professors as an undergraduate, studies reading comprehension. He once mentioned a program called LiveInk, which he researches. This program is intended to improve comprehension for ordinary English, not programming language, but I don't see why it wouldn't work for programming language as well, to some extent at least. It ...
2
I am not a psychologist. However, I am a writer, so I will try my best. When an author sets out to create a fictional work, he or she aims to immerse the reader in the world, to get the reader to care for the characters. All of this is done in order to leave an impression on the reader--an emotional connection established between the character and the reader ...
2
As Waldemar said, it is has a natural reason. During long evolution the eyes are adopted to acquire information through shadows around the objects, but it works also in reverted mode (light object on a dark background). However it is understood that the eye cannot work in two modes at the same time (normal and reverted), so black text on light background is ...
2
When I read a book I tend to read the words but to also hear them in my mind
Inner Speech is the general name given to this phenomenon,1 although it also goes by imagined speech, silent speech or covert speech, there are few studies and even less definite conclusions as to how it happens and its role in reading comprehension.
and only after that I ...
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