One to Ponder

[gwendolyngrace]

Okay, so here's something to think about.

The other night, Joel and I were talking about living alone and the high (IMO) density of people who talk to themselves when they live alone or spend a lot of time alone. In the Gweniverse, I'm never completely alone, though, because character-muses constantly provide the opposing voice in my internal dialogue. Like Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away anthropomorphizes "Wilson," I think we as humans need someone to bounce off of, even when that someone is a figment of imagination.

So we're talking about this, and I was saying that it's often characters from books, or TV or movies, and I mentioned how driving is a huge opportunity for this process, and how often these days Will Laurence or Temeraire are my co-pilots (Temeraire because he's a very fun conversationalist and Laurence because he occupies that lovely "straight man" capacity), and that when Granby's in the back seat it's even worse.

And Joel, who's just read His Majesty's Dragon, said he didn't know who Granby was - because, as he put it, he'd "never heard the word pronounced." I said that he'd read the book - he should recognize the name.

And then he said that he never internalizes the pronunciation of proper nouns and names while he's reading things.

I find that fascinating and impossible. I asked about maps: Does he "hear" the pronunciation of streets and such when reading the map? No. He "sees" them as glyphs and then looks for the glyph that matches the picture in his memory.

Bzuh?

So... what we want to know is how anomalous that is, or whether I'm the one who's odd in always figuring out how to say people and place-names when I'm reading. I've known for a long, long time that I prefer to "hear" the words spoken in my head as I read - it's one of the reasons I'm a slow reader - but is that "normal" or is it more normal to take in the word without an attempt to "speak" it and then simply recognize it on repetition? Is it a difference in thought? Teaching? Or actual brain process?

Discuss.

Comments

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

They're both perfectly normal; with English, that whole sound-it-out-in-your-head is a useful strategy for decoding unfamiliar words, and a lot of learners do well with phonics; however, with languages like Japanese you have to learn each shape individually, rather than considering it as a string of sounds - a significant number of kids being taught English don't do well with phonics because they're doing this learn-the-shape-of-the-word-and-attach-that-to-a-sound-in-the-air thing, rather than breaking it down into a string of sounds. That's just how their brains happen to work - and if they were learning a different kind of language, it wouldn't register as an issue.

It's not a difference in teaching - it's a difference in learning style. (Are you familiar with Multiple Intelligence Theory? That goes into more detail - but even without breaking learning styles down into a wide range, it's standard practice for teachers these days to actively cater to VAK - that's to say, incorporating Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic elements into every lesson, to cater to these three main ways of learning.)

I generally "hear" words in my head too - except when it's a particularly tricky proper name in an unfamiliar language, at which point I can resort to mentally thinking "that word there, with the Ns and Xs and not enough vowels" and not knowing how to say it.

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

Right, that makes perfect sense for Japanese and Chinese and other languages where the glyph is everything.

And yes, when a word is particularly long and complex, like F says below, Mayan or Incan or Congalese with the clicking sound characters... sometimes I simplify it to be able to "read" it without tripping myself. But yeah, there are very few instances where I give up and just recognize the word for its characters - and even then, when reading, I will almost invariably substitute "Whatsis" or "Whoozy" or "Thingummy" for the unpronounceable word.