8.4: Written Communication: Connecting Language

Humans are unique in how they use language.

It's true that complexity doesn't make us better, but it may make us smarter.
Squirrels and roaches are pretty good at keeping themselves going with their communication systems.
They're just as effective in their communication as we are.

The skills required to read are listed.

Determine the relationship between reading speed and comprehension.
We might wonder how our words are translated.

The history and evolution of the language can be traced back to the spelling conventions we have today.

When we're reading something that's challenging or engaging, we should be green.

You don't need purple to affect your comprehension.

We can turn it off when we want to.

There is a blue sitting next to us.

The green brakes on our brain stop us from processing what we see.

A demonstration of the automatic nature of The Stroop task shows that reading is automatic.

You'll try the control list first.

The task requires participants to identify the color of ink.
It was used to print words.
Try the Stroop interference list.
The task is probably more difficult.

Even though the task doesn't require them to read, most people find it hard to ignore printed words.

The Stroop task shows that reading is easy to read.
Children who are still getting the hang of reading don't experience interference in the Stroop task, so they find it easier than adults.
They can pay attention only to ink color because of their effort in reading.
The Stroop task becomes harder for children as they become more practiced readers.

Before beginning to read, beginning readers must learn a lot about both spoken and written language.

The hardest part of the reading process is phonemic awareness, which is the single best predictor of the start of children's reading.

Knowledge of the sounds they're looking for on the page is needed to connect the dots between speech and print.

There are two ways for children to read.

When they see words printed on a page, they have to learn to re-read them.
Reading can't become automatic without this skill.
Common words need to be recognized without having to sound out each word for the first time.

This can't be the whole story because we need to develop strategies for identifying common words when we're just learning to read.

It isn't always easy to figure out the correspondences between printed letters and sounds.

Not all sounds in the English language are related to a unique let sounding out words.

We need to memorize how the word's spelling is translated into the spoken word.

Children have to figure out which direction the text goes in their language before they can comprehend it.

We read left to right in English.
Text goes from right to left in Hebrew.
Text moves from top to bottom in Chinese.

There is a debate about the best way to teach reading.

Children were taught to recognize whole words in the United States for a long time.
The correlation between reading ability and the whole word recognition strategy was mistaken by the Correlation vs. Causation.

Experiments show that training children to be aware of sound-letter correspondences enhances reading and is a more effective way to get and keep children reading.

Speed-reading, also known as photoreading, megaspeed-reading, and alphanetics, can be advertised in magazines, Web ads, and on campus bulletin boards.

Some universities offer their own courses to increase students' reading rates.

Speed-reading works because it increases our reading rate.

The faster we read, the more we miss.
The average college student reads between 200 and 300 words per minute.
Comprehension rates below 50 percent can be achieved by reading faster than 400 words per minute.

They're based on a genuine Correlation vs Causation finding.

This correlation doesn't mean that we'll comprehend more if we start reading faster.

Proficient readers are better at comprehending and reading faster than poorer readers, but reading speed doesn't cause comprehension.

Speed-reading programs promise to increase our reading rates many times over.

There are people who can read between 15,000 and 30,000 words per minute.

Is the evidence strong enough to make a difference?

Commercial speed-reading programs don't work.

Students who increase their reading speed within this range are more likely to improve their comprehension on timed reading tasks.

In the same amount of time, they can cover more material.

As you walk out of class one day, you see a flyer with an open mind, but to insist on having evidence posted on an announcement board for a speed-reading course accepting them.

How do the principles of scientific thinking help that promises to cut your reading time in half, giving you more time to evaluate this claim about the effectiveness of this speed to sleep or hang out with your friends?

The six principles of scientific thinking could be used to become a more efficient reader.

As you evaluate this claim, look at the flyer.

A carefully designed study would probably disprove many of the claims.

The course probably would teach you how to skim, but we know from previous research that doubling or tripling speed would result in a decline in retention.
A study that compared each participant's reading rate before and after the course and also administered comprehension accuracy before and after the course would address whether any increase in reading speed also resulted in an increase in retention.
It is more likely that it will result in a decline in retention because speed readers miss a lot of information.

The research that would be required to show the effec tiveness of this course would be a replica of previous studies.

Researchers would need to conduct further research to discover why they failed to replicate the previous investigations if the research results deviated from what was found in previous studies.

The ad doesn't say what the researchers found.

This principle isn't relevant to the situation that they reached the end.

The evidence from the research was presented.

These should give us pause.
There's little reason to believe bias in those who chose to complete the course because of the self-selection research on the speed/accuracy trade-off.
The course would be helpful.
The flyer acknowledges that people who sign up to increase their reading might have the course, but it also says that they won't be fast readers because they won't be taught how to skim.

It's probably a good idea.

We use the thinking and reasoning economy frequently.

Errors in reasoning are a downside to cognitive economy.

There are methods for achieving cognitive economy.

If we apply Heuristics and top-down processing uncritically, we can make costly mistakes in reasoning.

To fully understand the complexity of language, we need the probability of an event based on how easy we can think of examples of that event.

Confirmation bias can lead to information.
Four levels work together to create mean to overlook conflicting evidence and only transmit information.
The smallest consistent with our expectations are morphos.

Thinking at Its Hardest: Decision- Making expression, gestures, contextual cues, and cultural conventions enter into how we interpret language are some of the extralinguistic information.

Discover what makes us make decisions.

Although it makes sense to make big, they also fine-tune their perception of phonemes over the ger decisions more carefully.

The impact on decisions production of language is influenced by how decisions are Children's word and syntax comprehension precedes their presented to us.

They acquire their first words when the underlying information relevant to their first birthday is the same as when they start combining words into decisions.

There are many daily problems that can be solved using heuristics.

Discuss the pros and cons of bilingualism.

Reasoning based on Bilingual individuals having one dominant language is one of the solutions.

There are three hurdles to effective problem solving that result in stronger metalinguistic skills.

Mental commands are used in most nonhuman animal communication systems.

The computer is a poor analogy for the human mind, as it is clear that aggression and mating displays but little else.
They don't have the same generativity of human language systems.

Our ability was modest.

Chimpanzees and African interact with the world and can teach gray parrots the basics of linguistic communication.
Humans don't learn from embodied accounts of thinking.
Bonobos explain our thinking and reasoning abilities and seem to learn more like humans, but don't exceed by neuroimaging studies demonstrating that our brain's the proficient level of about a two-and-a-half-year-old perceptual and motor areas are activated.

When learning to read, we use two strategies: whole word recognition and phonetic decomposition.

The skills required to read are listed.

Speed-reading courses require one of the most important prereading skills to be effective.