The Blog of Harald

In “Boom Bouma!”:http://www.atypi.org/news_tool/news_html?from=http://www.atypi.org/40_conferences/28_Vancouver/50_conference_news/index_html&newsid=142, we read that:

bq. There are:
1: Word-shape is critical in word-recognition
2: The reader recognbises each letter in turn (serially) and then assembles a word
3: The reader recognises each of the letters at the same time (in parallel) and assembles a word.

bq. Kevin presented the evidence which supports and undermines or falsifies each of these propopositions, on the way addressing most of the objections which typographers are likely to raise.

bq. The bottom line: on the weight of evidence, Kevin supports the ‘parallel letter recognition’ model. People don’t he says, recognise whole-word shapes. Instead the recognise each of the letter components and then make a series of best-guesses on the information returned to assemble, first, phonemes and then words.

I, on the other hand, believe that we still have no idea how it works :-)