(no subject)

[moominmolly]

When you read a book -- when you get into the reading groove, that is -- how do you absorb the individual words? Do you start at the beginning and go to the end? Do you recognize the letters as a group? Do you recognize the shape of the word, or word sets? Something else entirely? Is this something you can even SEE in yourself?

In general, I think of my brain as working very much like my brother Paul's, but in this case, we've never really lined up, so I'm curious how the rest of the world works. I sort of have a pathological relationship to letters, so I'm not very objective.

EDIT: when people speak, I see the letters pass through my brain.

Comments

[inthatoneway.livejournal.com]

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.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Yes! This is how I read. Thank you for doing such a good job of explaining so I don't have to.