What is more important?

[Guest realmayo]

On 10/24/2021 at 1:23 PM, alantin said:

To illustrate, do you need to subvocalize the ideograms in the picture to understand them?

I don't think I can answer that, but can I turn it around and ask: can you look at the pictures and understand them without subvocalising?

 

Because I kind of hear "gun" while looking at that picture. But I don't think I would if I saw a picture of a gun in a magazine.

 

What's different is that I'm actively trying to decipher that sign for its meaning. OR: the only reason I'm subvocalising is because we're discussing the topic, and normally I'd never subvocalise if I saw the sign. Hard to say!

 

On 10/24/2021 at 1:23 PM, Jan Finster said:

I guess it is possible to read this without subvocalising and to have the scene appear as an image or a  movie in your mind.

 

I wonder if we mean different things by "subvocalising"? A lot of the time people seem to subvocalise without realising that's what they're doing. Like, in theory: that scene can only appear as an image in your mind if you read the words and understand them. And you can't read the words and understand them without subvocalising.

[Guest realmayo]

I'd never heard of "rauding" before! ? https://www.jstor.org/stable/40016440

 

Rauding theory

Rauding is a word derived from two words: reading and auding. Reading means to look at words and determine their meaning, and auding means to listen to words and determine their meaning. The term rauding focuses upon the fact that the comprehension processes underlying typical reading and auding are the same. Rauding refers to comprehension of the complete thoughts in the sentences of textual material, whether presented visually or auditorily. When individuals are understanding most of the complete thoughts in the material they are reading, they are said to be rauding.

 

The rauding process is one of five basic reading processes, also called reading gears. Gear 1 is memorizing. Gear 2 is learning. Gear 3 is rauding. Gear 4 is skimming. Gear 5 is scanning. The basic process that most readers use most of the time is their rauding process, Gear 3. It involves looking at each consecutive word in the sentences of textual material and attempting to formulate the complete thoughts that the writer intended to communicate. College students ordinarily operate their rauding process at rates around 300 words per minute. Sometimes individuals shift up to a higher gear.

 

For example, they may shift up to a skimming process, Gear 4, when they need only an overview of the material and do not need to comprehend the complete thought in each sentence. College students typically operate skimming processes around 450 words per minute. Sometimes individuals shift up to a scanning process, Gear 5, whenever they only need to find a target word in material. College students typically operate scanning processes at rates around 600 words per minute, or even higher. Sometimes individuals shift down to a lower gear when they need more power. They may shift down to a learning process, Gear 2, whenever (a) they want to know the material well enough to be accountable for it later, or (b) the material is relatively difficult for them and they did not understand the sentences the first time they were read. College students typically operate learning processes at rates around 200 words per minute. Individuals may shift further down to a memorizing process, Gear 1 , whenever they need to be able to accurately recall the details of material later, either orally or in the form of an essay test, for example. College students typically operate memorizing processes at rates around 138 words per minute, or even lower.

[Jan Finster]

On 10/24/2021 at 2:41 PM, realmayo said:

And you can't read the words and understand them without subvocalising.

I am not sure this is true. Certainly language experts like Paul Nation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-mA5jFBF0U) stress the concept of "sight recognition" and not subvocalising for a reason. If it was not possible, why would they?

 

Your claim is a bit like saying you cannot really see the sun without subvocalising "sun" in your mind. Maybe there is a grain of truth to it, but then that would disqualify babies from seeing the sun..

 

On 10/24/2021 at 2:41 PM, realmayo said:

I wonder if we mean different things by "subvocalising"?

To me it is mostly involuntary, but if you pay attention to yourself you can catch/observe your mind "saying" the words and there may be ever so slight traces of lip movements (even though you are not whispering) 

 

[pinion]

On 10/24/2021 at 9:11 PM, Jan Finster said:

Certainly language experts like Paul Nation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-mA5jFBF0U) stress the concept of "sight recognition" and not subvocalising for a reason. If it was not possible, why would they?

My understanding is that sight recognition and subvocalizing are not mutually exclusive. Sight recognition is being able to recognize an entire word on the page as a shape/unit rather than having to work through it one letter or syllable (or character or component) at a time, which is entirely compatible with still subvocalizing the word that you've recognized as a unit.

[Jan Finster]

On 10/24/2021 at 3:20 PM, pinion said:

My understanding is that sight recognition and subvocalizing are not mutually exclusive. Sight recognition is being able to recognize an entire word on the page as a shape/unit rather than having to work through it one letter or syllable (or character or component) at a time, which is entirely compatible with still subvocalizing the word that you've recognized as a unit.

I do not disagree, but then he still advocates to get away from subvocalisation as it slows reading down. I am not sure if it is in the video I linked, but I am quite positive he said so in one of his lectures.

[Guest realmayo]

He chooses not to address subvocalisation at all in that video, which is all about how to read faster (by speed reading he means getting your reading speed closer to that of fluent readers).

 

I like Paul Nation and that's a good series of videos. He says that fluent English readers fixate their eyes on most (95%) of the words in a text, and that there is no way to spend less than 0.2 seconds per fixation. He says recent research indicates that people don't focus on clumps of words, but on individual words.

 

That means the absolute maximum reading speed is only a bit over 300 words per minute. If you go faster, that means you're either not focussing on every word (so you'll miss some information) or you already know lots about the topic -- so presumably you can afford to miss words because you know what they're going to mean.

 

Slow English readers might read letter to letter because they are slow to recognise words. I imagine slow Chinese readers character to character, or component to component (!) while fluent ones read word to word. So what Nation is emphasising is that you shouldn't read letter to letter or syllable to syllable, but word to word. If you regard subvocalisation as equivalent to reading syllable to syllable, then I agree with your main point. But that's not how most people seem to define subvocalisation.

 

On 10/24/2021 at 2:11 PM, Jan Finster said:

Your claim is a bit like saying you cannot really see the sun without subvocalising "sun" in your mind.

 

Not really: I was writing about the process of eliciting meaning from a sign; that is, I was treating an instructional graphic as if it was a word. As I wrote, that's different to just seeing a picture of a gun in a magazine, where I guess there'd be no subvocalisation, because a picture of a gun in a magazine, or indeed the sun in the sky, is not a sign whose meaning needs to be elicited.

 

 

[Insectosaurus]

While reading faster is a skill that is nice to have, the older I get the more I remind myself to slow down. That way I can enjoy the writing better (if it's a novel) or recall information better (if it's non-fiction). After I read the first half of a book on the Punic Wars a few years ago I stopped and said to myself: so, what can I now tell myself about the first Punic War? The answer was: not a lot. Forcing myself to read slower has been great for me personally.

[道艺]

On 10/24/2021 at 8:49 PM, realmayo said:

Sometimes individuals shift up to a higher gear.

That's such a cool metaphor for describing the various functions of reading. Awesome share and I find it very interesting to read about the brain scan reports about silent reading.

I always get a kick out of forum posts when someone posts scientific data or literal brain scans, and others respond with, "That's not true, and it can't be possible, because of my anecdote! I talked to somebody once who doesn't fit the mold!"

 

edit: left out 2 words

Edited October 25, 2021 at 08:18 AM by 道艺
left out two words

[杰.克]

On 10/25/2021 at 12:55 AM, 道艺 said:

I always get a kick out of forum posts when someone posts scientific data or literal brain scans, and others respond with, "That's not true, and it can't be possible, because of my anecdote! I talked to somebody once who doesn't fit the mold!"

?

[phills]

On 10/24/2021 at 5:36 PM, alantin said:

This is really interesting stuff! So have I understood this right? You are saying that while reading in Chinese, you'll see chunks like 毫无疑问, or 虽然......但是 and just understand them without subvocalizing them but the same isn't true for English and you would subvocalize phrases like "therefore" or "without a doubt..." etc.

 

I do in both.  I subvocalize more in both languages when I find harder sections to read, and I chunk more when I see easy and familiar text (which is just starting to happen for Chinese). 

 

I do notice I subvocalize less when the word is harder to vocalize, e.g. when I'm unsure of the pronounciation or it's tough.  I think the human brain automatically chooses the easier route.  So names are an example when I don't subvocalize in Chinese when I might subvocalize in English, just to save effort.

 

An equivalent example of this in English would be to find a name that's hard to particularly hard to vocalize.  E.g. consider this article about the space rock Oumuamua. 

 

Quote

   Oumuamua is the first known interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System. Researchers at Harvard’s Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics made waves in the mainstream media after publishing a paper claiming the object may have had an “artificial origin”—Presenting speculation that Oumuamua could have been sent “intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”

   Despite this, almost 4 years later, ‘Oumuamua is still in our Solar System. It’s currently cruising between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, covering a distance of 1,486,000 miles (2,391,485 km) every 24 hours.

   There’s a lot we haven’t learned about the quarter-mile-long object since its discovery in 2017. One thing is for certain, though; it’s traveling fast, blistering fast. In fact, when ‘Oumuamua was closest to Earth, it was tumbling through the inner Solar System at 196,000 miles per hour (87.3 kilometers per second), according to NASA. That is over 3 times faster than the average speed of a main-belt asteroid.  

 

As you read it, did you subvocalize Oumuamua every time you saw it, or just skip ahead when you saw the form "O_m____a" ?   I just converted it to "Om_____" after the first time, and eventually not even the "Om" part.

 

I often convert Chinese names (especially transliterated names that are 4 or 5 chars long) that I see in novels a lot to "Om____" rather than try to pronounce them in my head. 

[phills]

@realmayo  That rauding article is great!  Matches my experience very well.

 

What strikes me is that as you learn a language the speeds for all your gears go up.  Right now, I can only raud in Chinese (gear 3) at 180 cpm = 120 wpm.  An native speaker can raud at 2.5x my rauding speed.

 

Meanwhile my gear 2 is only at 120 cpm = 80 wpm.  A native speaker can do gear 2 again at 2.5x speed.

 

But each gear itself is a new skill that must be learned.  I can't scan yet in Chinese, gear 5.  I can at most go up to gear 4 (skim), and not consistently.  I can do 220cpm, which is about 150 wpm, and a native speaker can gear 4 (skim) at 3x my Chinese speed.

 

When you're first starting to read, you're basically only doing gear 1, what they call memorizing, and you're only doing it at 1/3rd to 1/5th the speed of a native (40-70cpm, which is how I felt after my first book).  As you get better, you learn to go into gear 2 & 3... while improving your baseline speed as well.

 

It puts rauding (gear 3) into a kind of a goldilocks zone where you're improving both your reading & listening skills at the same time.  That also matches my experience where if you're not reading fast enough, you're not improving your listening because you're not challenging your processing limits.  While if you read go too fast, you're also not improving your listening because you're skipping whole words / phrases / sentences.  (Although there might be a higher gear of "audio skim" that you can work on too...)

[alantin]

@realmayo, that Rauding theory is very interesting and seems to explain a lot of things! The whole Gear metaphor makes perfect sense. Also I feel @phills's observations ring true for me to at-least with my English "gears". I'll have to read more about this.

 

 

On 10/24/2021 at 3:41 PM, realmayo said:

A lot of the time people seem to subvocalise without realising that's what they're doing. Like, in theory: that scene can only appear as an image in your mind if you read the words and understand them. And you can't read the words and understand them without subvocalising.

I think there is a Then there is also subvocalizing without actually processing anything... I wonder how that fits to the Rauding Theory. Suddenly realizing that you have read two or three pages, actually carefully subvocalizing every word, but don't remember anything about the content because you were thinking about something completely different. I guess it is essentially the reading "subprocess" becoming so natural that it doesn't really consume much mental effort anymore. Also related to almost involuntarily reading something that pops up in front of you.

 

I wonder when I stop feeling a little initial inertia when starting to read a paragraph of Chinese. Guess you'll know you're getting good at reading in a foreign language when you can actually zone out somewhere between the gears while doing it. ?

[alantin]

On 10/25/2021 at 2:55 AM, 道艺 said:

I always get a kick out of forum posts when someone posts scientific data or literal brain scans, and others respond with, "That's not true, and it can't be possible, because of my anecdote! I talked to somebody once who doesn't fit the mold!"

 

If this is some kind of a poke at me, I'm afraid you misunderstand my intention. I found those silent reading results interesting too and I'm not denying them, if that's how you interpret me. The thing about scientific results is that they are always specific to the research question being asked. They may offer insights to something related and they usually raise new questions, but the point is to answer a specific question. So therefore if one research reveals that B is due to A, it does not follow that D is due to C unless the point of the research is to show this correlation.

 

It may very well be that the mental reading process for native Chinese speakers is the same as it is for native English speakers, but my uninitiated assumption is that the writing systems of the two languages are so different that this may or may not be so and it merits it's own research question. Like you implied, there is a mold and no amount of brain scans and experiments on English speakers answer the question of whether or not the 1,31 billion Chinese somebodies out there fit in that same mold.

 

To be fair, I haven't looked much into the research myself. Like I said, I only checked the reference list on the Wikipedia page on subvocalization, which seemed to only include western sources and the Chinese version of the page was only few lines long. So I'm still wondering if there is research on the subject from the point of view of ideographic languages or if this even is something seen interesting in the east. However the discussion since took a different turn and there seems not to be much interest in this. I'll have look into it sometime.

[Guest realmayo]

On 10/25/2021 at 10:51 PM, alantin said:

So I'm still wondering if there is research on the subject from the point of view of ideographic languages

I suspect that written Chinese operates the same way, because I assume it's still largely phonetic. Would be interesting to compare Chinese with the even more phonetic Korean writing, given that they both compress syllables into small, maybe easier-to-read or scan, squares.

 

I'd also guess that, compared to western scripts, in Chinese and Korean you can maybe skip very predictable text quicker, because you know how much text 5 syllables should occupy on the page, which isn't quite the case with an abc language.

 

On 10/25/2021 at 9:51 AM, phills said:

or just skip ahead when you saw the form "O_m____a" ?  

 

Definitely this, and certainly also for Chinese names, particularly where there's a character that I'm just guessing at the pronunciation. At a certain point in a book I have to stop, force myself to gather up the most common names, make sure I do know their pronunciation, and then say them out loud a few times.

[ablindwatchmaker]

On 10/23/2021 at 9:00 AM, Jan Finster said:

Regarding listening vs reading: I believe both can be exhausting, but I can imagine active listening is more tiring

 

If I go too crazy with listening, my anxiety really starts to get out of hand, my heart rate shoots up, and I get extremely aggravated. Whatever is happening, it’s harder on me than anything else.