General font for dyslexic readers

[david h]

> Paul Saenger, "Space Between Words - The Origins of Silent Reading".

Better than... or see the book by Walter J. Ong -- Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.

"For anyone who has a sense of what words are in a primary oral
culture, or a culture not far removed from primary orality, it is not
surprising that the Hebrew term dabar means ‘word’ and ‘event’...

"Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as
events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend
rather to be assimilated to things, ‘out there’ on a flat surface. Such
‘things’ are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not
actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic
resurrection...

"In an oral culture, restriction of words to sound determines not
only modes of expression but also thought processes...

"An oral culture has no texts. How does it get together
organized material for recall?..."

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> Does silent reading activate the speech centres of the brain?

Christoph Scheepers - 2011 Silent reading of direct versus indirect speech activates voice-selective areas in the auditory cortex Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Vol.23(10) pp 3146-3152

> There are no word pauses in speech.

And why not? what do you mean by 'pauses' -- length or duration?
Biblical Hebrew is a good example; also Samaritan Hebrew & Aramaic (close to Tannaitic Hebrew!) -- the stress is like word separators or word boundaries

[William Berkson]

>There are no word pauses in speech.
I've wondered about why we don't have any problem with no gap between words in speech, but I've got an idea When we read, we jump ahead to a certain chunk of space, which the fovea can capture. This may have one or more words or no word. And when we jump maybe the parafovea gives us an idea of where to jump. This eating of text in eye sized bites that may or may not isolate one word is probably why word space are so helpful.

In listening, we have a wave of signal that progresses through time, and we can mentally cut it at the point it achieves 'wordness', and start listening for a new word. So it seems like the demands of the mechanics is quite different.

Processing the visual signal seems to need a lot of parallel processing that maybe is different from listening. Maybe that's involved in dyslexia, to return to the topic.

[hrant]

William, there might be a much simpler explanation: speech is much slower than [immersive] reading. You know those radio/TV commercials where the guy at the end says stuff like "side effects include sweating, death and constipation" so fast and with no pauses that you can't really listen? There you go.

BTW, word spaces are in fact critical to the smooth operation of the parafovea - it's the least it can do. But my view is that the parafovea is in fact able to provide far more help than merely telling us where the words are. Why would it be stingy?

"Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral

Actually what would be nice to forget is linguists' persistent delusion that reading is strongly related to sounds.

hhp