Reading is Unnatural
Abstract
Humans are “prewired” to learn a spoken language, but not to learn to read. This chapter reviews current research findings on how people read and learn to read, including how our eyes move as we read, how reading is primarily a function of fovea vision with a little help from peripheral vision, and whether reading is mainly a top-down or bottom-up process. It then shows that poor display of information can disrupt reading and that many user interfaces can be improved by reducing the reading required.
Keywords
reading; language; temporal lobe; saccade; fovea; perifovea; context; patterns; top-down; bottom-up; Broca’s area; Wernicke’s area; vocabulary; word frequency; jargon; typefaces; font size; background; ...
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