Bola Łukasz, Radziun Dominika, Siuda-Krzywicka Katarzyna, Sowa Joanna E, Paplińska Małgorzata, Sumera Ewa, Szwed Marcin
Department of Psychology, Jagiellonian UniversityKraków, Poland.
Laboratory of Brain Imaging, Neurobiology Center, Nencki Institute of Experimental BiologyWarsaw, Poland.
Front Psychol. 2017 Apr 4;8:514. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00514. eCollection 2017.
It has been hypothesized that efficient reading is possible because all reading scripts have been matched, through cultural evolution, to the natural capabilities of the visual cortex. This matching has resulted in all scripts being made of line-junctions, such as T, X, or L. Our aim was to test a critical prediction of this hypothesis: visual reading in an atypical script that is devoid of line-junctions (such as the Braille alphabet read visually) should be much less efficient than reading in a "normal" script (e.g., Cyrillic). Using a lexical decision task, we examined Visual Braille reading speed and efficiency in sighted Braille teachers. As a control, we tested learners of a natural visual script, Cyrillic. Both groups participated in a two semester course of either visual Braille or Russian while their reading speed and accuracy was tested at regular intervals. The results show that visual Braille reading is slow, prone to errors and highly serial, even in Braille readers with years of prior reading experience. Although subjects showed some improvements in their visual Braille reading accuracy and speed following the course, the effect of word length on reading speed (typically observed in beginning readers) was remained very sizeable through all testing sessions. These results are in stark contrast to Cyrillic, a natural script, where only 3 months of learning were sufficient to achieve relative proficiency. Taken together, these results suggest that visual features such as line junctions and their combinations might be necessary for efficient reading.
有一种假说认为，高效阅读是可能的，因为通过文化进化，所有阅读文字体系都已与视觉皮层的自然能力相匹配。这种匹配导致所有文字体系都由线条交叉点构成，比如T、X或L。我们的目的是检验这一假说的一个关键预测：在一种没有线条交叉点的非典型文字体系（如视觉阅读盲文）中的视觉阅读效率，应该远低于在“正常”文字体系（如西里尔文）中的阅读效率。我们使用词汇判断任务，研究了有视力的盲文教师视觉阅读盲文的速度和效率。作为对照，我们测试了自然视觉文字体系西里尔文的学习者。两组人员都参加了为期两个学期的视觉盲文或俄语课程，同时定期测试他们的阅读速度和准确性。结果显示，即使是有多年阅读经验的盲文读者，视觉阅读盲文的速度也很慢，容易出错，而且高度串行。尽管受试者在课程结束后视觉阅读盲文的准确性和速度有所提高，但在所有测试环节中，单词长度对阅读速度的影响（通常在初学者中观察到）仍然非常显著。这些结果与西里尔文这种自然文字体系形成鲜明对比，学习西里尔文只需3个月就能达到相对熟练的程度。综上所述，这些结果表明，线条交叉点及其组合等视觉特征可能是高效阅读所必需的。
