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From: jqj@cornell.UUCP (J Q Johnson)
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Speed Reading
Message-ID: <2658@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 23-Jun-85 06:57:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.2658
Posted: Sun Jun 23 06:57:09 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Jun-85 08:03:41 EDT
References: <1573@orca.UUCP> <292@ucdavis.UUCP>
Reply-To: jqj@cornell.UUCP (J Q Johnson)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept.
Lines: 25
Summary: 

In article <292@ucdavis.UUCP> ccrbrian@deneb.UUCP (Brian Reilly) writes:
>The device you referred to is, I think, called a tachistiscope (sp?).
>These were widely used in the 50's to train people to read faster, but the
>argument against them is that you don't have one when you are reading a 
>book, so there is less transfer of skill than with techniques based on 
>work done with printed material.

Actually, a T-scope, although it can be used for such purposes, is not
at all suited for the task.  A T-scope is actually a box with a bunch
of electrically controlled mirrors and lights that allows an experimenter
to present a small number of different pictures/stimuli to a subject
in very rapid succession, with fine (millisecond) control over timing
and excellent control over illumination and registration.  Unfortunately,
the number of fields (different pictures) is typically 3 or 4, and changing
the picture in a field is typically done manually, so they are not well
designed for presenting more than 3 or 4 stimuli in rapid succession.

There has been a tremendous amount of research on eye movement and
reading in the past 5 years or so.  Could someone who knows this research
please summarize?  In particular, my understanding (am I correct?) is 
that a typical reading strategy is to occasionally glance back at
previously scanned text (perhaps to save short term memory while processing
a syntactic transformation?), and that forward-only pacing reduces 
comprehension (particularly of syntactically complex sentences?) by 
interfering with this.