Comments on: An experimental experiment

By: Michelle

Michelle — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:04:21 +0000

I got 5/5 for both… Must be a crazy genius.

By: Thomas Tsoi

Thomas Tsoi — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:59:35 +0000

Oh, it’s getting more interesting now. I thought the experiment didn’t really work because my sister and I tried and we both got more or less the same score for both sides. Maybe it does work statistically after all, if we can somehow accumulate the test results we may in fact see a trend.

By: Malcolm - UKcopy

Malcolm - UKcopy — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:53:17 +0000

I got the same as Ayana ( 5 and 2 ). We tend to fall into groups with so many cognitive skills that I would guess that we do with this one too. I’m dyslexic and I find ascenders, descenders and other visual landmarks help me greatly when it comes to understanding things quickly. This is not just with the written word but also with symbols too.
I imagine a great many non-dyslexics would find similar results to me whilst maybe an equal number may find the opposite to be true.

By: Ayana

Ayana — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:40:35 +0000

I got 5/5 on the left and 2/5 on the right… I guess I helped prove this theory =]

By: Thomas Tsoi

Thomas Tsoi — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:55:15 +0000

Presumably if you have the same score for both that means the ascenders and descenders have no effect in helping you recognize words. But, well, to be frank I’m now in the opinion that my little experiment simply doesn’t work. There are several problems in it. First there is recency effect (which I did try to minimize by asking you to wait for a while after the presentation of all the words.) Then from my anecdotal observation, we only focus on the first few letters when we look at the words, a result probably caused by the fact that the words are too long, thus the word shapes become less distinctive. In fact I have no idea about the experimental setup in the relevant research. From what I read from Reference 2, it seems that it would be better to present items seperately. And in a related test they presented each stimulus for as brief as 5-10ms while I presented it for 100ms. A very brief presentation is necessary because it ensures that the subject cannot have enough time to analyze the letters individually and focus on the outlines of the words instead. Finally the sample is too small in any case.
But anyway, it’s just what first came to mind when I read about the phenomenon, not too bad as some fun.
The book I’m reading is “Writing Systems - A linguistic introduction,” the one listed under References above.