From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!uwvax!pal Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: Witness for the prosecution Article-I.D.: uwvax.515 Posted: Thu Jul 29 14:29:53 1982 Received: Sat Jul 31 00:31:56 1982 The following is taken from an article by John Theios and Gerard Muise in "Cognitive Theory", edited by Castellan, Pisoni and Potts (detailed reference available on request). "The important question for us to answer is, `How much can reading speed be slowed down by a totally incorrect spelling?'" [...] "... we conducted an experiment in which readers were presented with a sequence of words and pseudowords, in which for each word, there was a yoked pseudoword which was homophonic to the word, but which was spelled differently and in fact was NOT a word in the English language." [...] "There were 12 readers, all college students, and 100 monosyllabic word-pseudoword pairs ..." [...] "The effect apparently is real; nonstandard spelling slows down the reading of individual words by about 20-30 msec, even if phonology is held constant."The prosecution hereby charges rvpalliende with gross waste of people's time, and seeks damages in the amount of 20 msec for each "ov" in his articles, to be paid to each reader of this newsgroup. Anil A. Pal, plaintiff pal@uwisc or harpo!uwvax!pal