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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

wow wait this might explain a thing i’ve always been confused about. my whole life i’ve watched other people assigned to read a piece of text who skipped or substituted specific words and i never understood why that was happening. like… it seemed like they couldn’t tell???

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· Oct 29, 2021

(h/t @personalitygeni) this is kind of wild to get into makes me realize I don't actually know how I learned how to read, it was just sheer joyful immersion for me I don't actually really (consciously) know how to teach someone to read either apmreports.org/episode/2019/0

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1:33 AM · Oct 29, 2021Twitter for iPad

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

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there are also a couple of rationalists who are very sharp intellectually and also literally can’t spell and that really wilded me out too. one of them told me “yeah i just have to guess the spelling from how the word sounds, every time”

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

i grew up watching a ton of TV with closed captioning on and i think it made me a little synesthetic between the sounds and spellings of words. they’re very tightly identified in my head. when people say things i don’t know how to spell i have trouble remembering

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

i have the strongest preference for wanting captions on when watching TV of anyone i know 😅 otherwise i have to work harder to parse what’s being said y’know?

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

as a kid sometimes when i was bored i would air-type my own internal monologue. it was fun to see if i could do it fast enough to keep up

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I also noticed this in school—when some kids read aloud, they’d haltingly work through what *seemed* like each word, but wasn’t: they’d make substitutions & omissions or rattle off common/predictable phrasings as a unit, and usually couldn’t “sound out” unfamiliar words at all

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Even people who read fairly well were often struggling like this, just faster at it Clues included a dead pause between pages, and the use of a “reading voice”—an intonation pattern that mimics normal prosody, but is utterly unlike it because it’s still going one word at a time

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This is blowing my mind. So then maybe Asian Americans have a leg up in learning to read English because Chinese and Japanese are pictographic and so you start from the assumption that you need to memorize the meanings of words instead of predicting from context.

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@StupendousGrav1

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I suspect a lot of people hallucinate when they read and don't even know it because their dissonance detectors don't work with text.