Reading & in-betweens: Making sense of words

If you are reading this column, in all probability you have already gone through a lot of words and sentences with much ease: You are a proficient reader who uses existing knowledge to make sense of text. Billions of humans belong to this category — just glancing through words and deciphering the meaning of a sentence, sometimes within the blink of an eye.

We appear to be natural at reading, but is that true? Formal reading and writing evolved just a few thousand years ago, much later after the first civilisations came into existence.

To develop reading skills, the brain had to repurpose a lot of functions that were developed over thousands of years. But how?

Before we dive deeper into this topic, a fun fact: Reading involves OPTICAL ILLUSION. Though letters appear to carry the same weight in this typeface, “O” is ever-so-slightly taller than “I”, and “L” is just a bit smaller than “C”. In fact, letters with rounded tops are slightly taller than those with flat tops, so they appear to be of the same size. This is because we usually don’t carry a ruler when we read; we read with our eyes and brain, and for them, appearances matter.

According to researchers, the key to understanding the evolution of reading skills is determining how and why humans first began to make repetitive marks. Extensive brain imaging of the visual cortex as people read text has given insights into how the brain perceives simple patterns.

Derek Hodgson in his study (in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports) concluded that “the first non-functional marks may not be representational or symbolic but are closely tied to the way the early visual cortex processes visual information”.

According to Professor Hodgson and many others, the way the early visual cortex, where visual information from the eye first impacts the cortex, processes information resulted in our ancestors’ ability to engrave simple patterns. This area of the brain has neurons coding for edges, lines, T-junctions, and “Os” — the building blocks of almost all letters. Each pattern in the shape of an alphabetical letter triggers neurons and when a certain combination of them fires together, they trigger higher-order neurons, which eventually help us decode the meaning of an image. The way humans derived words from the shapes of objects helped us read and understand faster, eventually burying the earliest but cumbersome form of writing, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or yet-to-be-deciphered Indus script.

The other question is: Do we recognise a word by its shape or do we actually read the letters? Way back in the 1880s, American psychologist James McKeen Cattell flashed words and letters before his subjects for a few milliseconds and they recognised more words than just letters. It has also been found that people perceive letters in a better way when words flashed are real and not pseudowords. This is called the word superiority effect.

In kindergarten or early years of schooling, we usually learn a word by sounding it out — EdyUkAYshUHn (education). But once learnt, we usually don’t process a word in such a way; we see it and recognise it.

Earlier scientists thought we remember the shape of a word and quickly realise it based on that, i.e why we’re not good at READING ALL CAPITAL SENTENCES or mISsHApeD tExTs. But this explanation is a bit simplistic.

Our eyes move when we go through texts but they don’t scan them smoothly — they jump ahead, they pause, and sometimes they even go backwards. These saccades are a lot faster than the blink of an eye. So why our vision doesn’t get blurry with such rapid eye movement? Because our brains keep filling in the gaps. Our eyes stop on a word for roughly 200 milliseconds and then they usually leapfrog 7-9 letters, still, they never land in the middle of a word; some types of words — such as a, the, and — they many a time skip.   

Our eyes gather information from three regions of photoreceptors — fovea where visual acuity is the highest; parafovea, a region in the retina that circumscribes the fovea; perifovea gathers information for our peripheral vision. Each time our eyes stop, our fovea identifies three to four letters, helping us to recognise a single word; blurrier information from parafovea gives us a hint of what lies next; perifovea allows us to guess the length of upcoming words. They together guide our eyes: What to skip and where to focus, such as long or unfamiliar words.

What does our brain do? The dictionary in our brain works similarly to the automatic word or text suggestion when we send messages over WhatsApp or type an e-mail — multiple suggestions of words with two common letters, then fewer with three, and then more often than not the exact word.

All these aforementioned processes happen in less than a second — again and again.

The evolution of reading in such a way helps us enjoy a good novel and great stories, until the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed.