Processing Of Visible Language

The organization of the page as a technological device and our acquisition of information from it were subjects of keen interest to psychologists and designers a century ago. Research on the topics proceeded briskly for more than a quarter of a century then, and was brought together in the still useful survey and analysis of them all that E. B. Huey published in 1908 as "The psychology and pedagogy of reading, with a review of the history of reading and writing and of methods, texts, and hygiene in reading. " Research on the psychological aspects of literacy tended to diminish after that peak, but research on design and on the technology of presenting infor mation has flourished apace meanwhile. Perhaps somewhat stimulated by the reissue of Huey's book by MIT Press in 1968, psychologists have returned to the study of literacy. The symposium that the present volume reports was an effort to bring together again psychologists interested in literacy and related forms of information acquisition, graphics designers, and engineers actively involved in the development and deployment of the newer technology. During this century, psychologists, graphics designers, and engineers have lost much of the mutual communication that their joint enterprise should encourage. The design of machines has often followed the convenience of packaging, the design of displays has often followed the designer's personal esthetic.

The organization of the page as a technological device and our acquisition of information from it were subjects of keen interest to psychologists and designers a century ago. Research on the topics proceeded briskly for more than a quarter of a century then, and was brought together in the still useful survey and analysis of them all that E.B. Huey published in 1908 as "The psychology and pedagogy of reading, with a review of the history of reading and writing and of methods, texts, and hygiene in reading." Research on the psychological aspects of literacy tended to diminish after that peak, but research on design and on the technology of presenting infor mation has flourished apace meanwhile. Perhaps somewhat stimulated by the reissue of Huey's book by MIT Press in 1968, psychologists have returned to the study of literacy. The symposium that the present volume reports was an effort to bring together again psychologists interested in literacy and related forms of information acquisition, graphics designers, and engineers actively involved in the development and deployment of the newer technology. During this century, psychologists, graphics designers, and engineers have lost much of the mutual communication that their joint enterprise should encourage. The design of machines has often followed the convenience of packaging, the design of displays has often followed the designer's personal esthetic.

The second symposium on processing visible language constituted a different "mix" of participants from the first. Greater emphasis was given to the design of language, both in its historical development and in its current display; and to practical questions associated with machine-implementation oflanguage, in the interactions of person and computer, and in the characteristics of the physical and environmental objects that affect the interaction. Another change was that a special session on theory capped the proceedings. Psychologists remained heavily involved, however, both as contributors to and as discussants of the work pre sented. The motivation of the conferences remains one of bringing together graphic designers, engineers, and psychologists concerned with the display and acquisition of visible language. The papers separately tended to emphasize the one of the three disciplines that mark their authors' field of endeavor, but are constructed to be general rather than parochial. Moreover, within the three disciplines, papers emphasized either the textual or the more pictorial aspects. For example, a session on writing systems ranged from principles that seem to characterize all such systems to specific papers on ancient Egyptian writing, modern Korean, and English shorthand. The complementary session on the nontextual media opened with a discussion of general principles of pictorial communication and included papers on communicating instructions, general information, or religious belief through designs and other pictorial forms, as well as a discussion. of misrepresentation.

This volume was designed to identify the current limits of progress in the psychology of reading and language processing in an information processing framework. Leaders in their fields of interest, the chapter authors couple current theoretical analyses with new, formally presented experiments. The research -- cutting-edge and sometimes controversial -- reflects the prevailing analysis that language comprehension results in numerous levels of representation, including surface features, lexical properties, linguistic structures, and idea networks underlying a message as well as the situations to which a message refers. As a group, the chapters highlight the impact that input modality -- auditory or written -- has on comprehension. Finally, the studies also capture the evolution of new topic matter and ongoing debates concerning the competing paradigms, global proposals, and methods that form the foundation of the enterprise. The book presents current accounts of research on word-, sentence-, and text-processing. It will prove informative for experimental psychologists as well as investigators in cognitive science disciplines such as computer science, linguistics, and educational psychology. The book will also be very helpful to graduate students who wish to develop expertise in the psychology of language processes. For them, it collects, in a single volume, readings that are representative of progress concerning many central problems in the field. As such, it is distinct from the numerous collected volumes that concentrate on a single issue. Complete author and subject indexes facilitate effective use of the volume.