I know that when I'm reading a story with names I recognize the names more as shapes and patterns. If it's not a common name I often find myself unable to tell someone what the name is; I don't actually parse it into phonemes, it's just a recognizable shape to me. I'm pretty sure I do the same with most words in general. I soak in just enough of the letters, taken as a group, to identify the word and that's it. I also suspect that I do much the same thing on the sentence level. If the context of a sentence is clear the end is sometimes predictable, and so I just sort of glance at it to confirm that my prediction is correct. I'm pretty sure I do this because I sometimes catch myself reading things that suddenly don't make sense, and I have to go back a few sentences to find out where I got off track. I can often track the disconnect to a single word that resembles another word visually. For example, the end of your post read as "we've never really LIVED up" the first time I read it, because for some reason that made more sense to me.