"When we look at a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing to be processed. That's the finding from a new study that shows the brain learns words quickly by tuning neurons to respond to a complete word, not parts of it." - Maitani

""We are not recognizing words by quickly spelling them out or identifying parts of words, as some researchers have suggested. Instead, neurons in a small brain area remember how the whole word looks -- using what could be called a visual dictionary," he says." - Maitani

Even for German speakers? :) - Stephen Mack

Are you hinting at our famous long words such as Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitän or Blumentopferde? That's an interesting question, what happens when we read a compound word? I suppose we simultaneously see the whole word and identify the parts. Hm. - Maitani

Yup, that was what I was wondering. - Stephen Mack

You have compound words in English, too. - Maitani

Not nearly as long! Do long compounds generate a slideshow? - Stephen Mack

Based only on self-observation, I have the impression we take them in simultaneously. - Maitani

I'd like to learn more about this topic, if there are really differences in perceiving words/text between native speakers of different languages (I think there have to be), how we perceive compound words, if there are implications for teaching children/people to read. - Maitani

Btw, most of our compound words aren't as long as "Donaudampfschifffahrts....." (I suspect that one has intentionally been constructed for the purpose of demonstration). Two elements is absolutely common, three isn't unusual, but four often comes across as artificial or constructed ad hoc. The compounds that make it into the lexicon are the shorter ones. - Maitani

I definitely look at some Korean words as images. I them know on sight, especially verbs with the high honorific endings. I see -습니다 or -습니까 & immediately know I need to change my tone and what's a question or statement. To answer your question, with English, I can look at a whole word and just know. I rarely come across a word I don't know or, at least, can't figure out. With Spanish, I can read a word, though I do stumble on words with 'q' or 'z' in them. In Korean, I have to read block by block. I understand why little kids are made to write out each combo of letters in blocks.(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dpNg-4...) It reinforces that image. - Anika

Anika, I am not sure I understand what you mean by "block" in Korean. - Maitani

Are blocks something like letters, or combinations of letters? - Maitani

I think the 'skipping over' part is related to what we mean by a 'block' - and that this is closely related to reading difficulties some people have. When people 'jumble' words, skip over them, read them in the wrong order and/or don't find the meaning in them, there's evidence to suggest it's perceptual. - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

Do you mean how in Hangul, the assemblages that look like single logograms are actually composed of multiple letters? - Victor Ganata

I think this phenomenon of chunking was tangentially touched upon by that meme where you could comprehend words just from the initial and final consonants even if the middle was scrambled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Victor Ganata

I think this is also part of the reason why certain English words have changed spelling drastically over the years while others have been well conserved. It frequently has nothing to do with actual phonetics and is often just about avoiding visual ambiguity. - Victor Ganata

This phenomenon of chunking is probably why spelling reform faces such difficulties in implementation. - Victor Ganata

Oh, sorry. Yes, each 'block' has 2 - 3 letters. Take 미국 The first 'block' is '미' and the second one is '국'. I immediately recognize '국' to mean soup, mix, or place/people. BTW, on the flip, Koreans like to shorten words mostly with syllabic abbreviation or just to their initial letters, which is terrible for a new learner. Also, the new trend of creating non-standard compound words is tiresome. Everyone knows 'somek' is soju & beer and 'chimek' is chicken & beer, both words using the initial sounds of their full words. But some people combine random stuff like 'tteokder' meaning 'tteokboekki and cider (Sprite/7UP) or 'bangpi' to mean 'bread and coffee'. - Anika

We learn new words by absorbing the totality of their associations and connections with other words, with particular pragmatic situations, with particular emotions, with particular sensory stimulation, etc. Words are embedded in many patterns across multiple dimensions of experience. And this is why the natural language understanding component of artificial intelligence is so difficult to solve. Words are the tip of a huge invisible iceberg. How does one make conscious and formally map out all that unconscious complexity? Make it computable? - Sean McBride

Anika, thank you. Fascinating how they combine the words in such creative ways. :-) - Maitani