On Tue, 6 Dec 2005 22:46:38 -0700, "Monique Y. Mudama"
<spam@bounceswoosh.org> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

I didn't.  In a British-style private school I was taught to memorise
each new word in its entirety -- by the shape of the entire word.  In
my second grade in public school they taught the phonics system. I
thought my teacher was nuts when she would say, "what does T say?"  I
thought to myself "It doesn't say anything. It is just a mark on the
paper!"  I was very literal, back then.

I remember my extreme joy on looking at the word "crab" and suddenly
noticing that there was a connection between the letters used in a
word and its sound. After this revelation, in a matter of weeks I went
from the bottom in the class to top.

 > Er, no, I guess "we" don't all ... for some languages, the written

Surprisingly even the Latin letters ultimately come from pictograms when
tracing back their history (Semitic -> Greek -> Latin).
For example:
  "O"  comes from first letter of semitic "eye"
  "N"  comes from first letter of semitic "snake"
See http://www.ancientscripts.com/protosinaitic.html

But I'm afraid we are slightly off-topic here ;-)

Yes, but only initially. Later -after years of repetition- the long
processing chain
  reading the word "dog" -> sounding out "dog"
  -> hearing the word "dog" -> having the "dog" impression
is short-circuited to
  reading "dog" -> having the "dog" impression

me, too...

Me too, on both counts.  (Aside: I wish that technical writers could get it
into their damnably small heads that illustrations are for /illustration/ --
diagrams should supplement text, not replace it!)

I learned by reading aloud, and then learned to read by "speaking" internally
(I can still remember the moment of inspiration when I realised that I didn't
actually have to /say/ anything).  I quickly changed to "speed reading"
(probably in less than a year).  For me reading feels like language -- in just
the same way as we don't hear sounds (in our native tongues) and /then/
understand them, I don't see text and then understand it as a consciously
separate process.  The text /is/ the meaning, with no intermediary steps.  I
guess users of sign-language feel the same way -- the /medium/ is visual, but
the /content/ is pure meaning, not speech-encoded-visually.  (Is it possible to
learn to read before learning to speak, I wonder ?  If so then a "slow hearer"
would transcribe sounds into signs in their heads, whereas the rarer "speed
hearers" would just understand the sounds directly.)

As to why some people end up reading like that, I have no real idea.  Practise
must be a big part of it.  In my own case I suspect the tendency was amplified
by what otherwise would have manifested as a very mild dyslexia.  By absorbing
info "chunked" more coarsely, and (I speculate) using slightly different
processing pathways in the brain, I learned (unconsciously) to side-step the
problem, and became an apparently "advanced" reader.  The downside is that my
spelling and ability to proof-read my own words is lamentable, and always has
been.

Incidentally, but not too far off-topic (for the newsgroup, if not for this
thread ;-) mangled identifiers like abbreviations and that ghastly "Hungarian"
convention /really/ throw off my ability to read.  Perhaps for people who "read
aloud inside" the mangling has little effect, but I can't read the things at
all.  I worked for half a year on a codebase that made heavy use of Hungarian,
and by the end of it I was no nearer being able to read that code than at the
start.  The same point applies to people who post in "text-ese" -- if you read
8 as the sound "ate" then you'll be able to decode h8 easily (or rather, with
no more difficulty than you would when reading real English), but for folk like
me, h8 is no more meaningful than, say, h7.  I hardly ever event try to read
such posts, a simple 'u' for you is enough to put me off.

Slightly related to that: I've seen it claimed (in a plausible context -- i.e.
not the Web or a "pop science" page in a magazine) that Chinese people suffer
less from dyslexia than Westerners, with the associated speculation that the
underlying brain differences do occur in Chinese folk, but that they have less
effect on reading ability.  OTOH, I've also seen the claim (in the same
reputable context) that that's tosh.

I have also seen the claim (reputable) that Chinese readers read much faster
(on average) than English readers -- presumably because they /have/ to
speed-read/flash-read (as we would call it).

BTW, I think the word you want is not "pictogram" (which is restricted to the
case where the sign is an genuine picture), but "logogram" or "logograph" (a
sign for a word).

   -- chris