9.2.3. Learning: Knowledge

All perception is a result of decision-making process that reflects past experience and future expectations as well as the information received at the present moment. A reader extracts meaning from the environment – he reduces his uncertainty – on the basis if the visual information (the surface structure of the language) and all the deep structure of the language and knowledge of the world at large that is contained within his brain. It has already been mentioned that language could not be comprehended unless the receiver made his critical, active contribution. But the process of reading would be a physical impossibility even if all the information were concentrated into the words of the printed text. The visual system is not capable of getting information into the brain fast enough to take all responsibility for reading. There’s a limited-capacity short-term memory that creates a bottleneck in the transmission of visual information to the comprehension processes of the brain. Therefore, it is essential that the brain provide more information from its side of the eyeballs than the eyes pick up from the page.

The perceptual process involves components of prediction, identification and interpretation.

Prediction is obviously involved because of the way events can confirm or confound our expectations. The more skilled the reader is, the less visual information he needs from the page – the more he is able to predict what the unread material will be.

Perception involves identification because we do more than just tell the object or event from one another. We recognise that they are familiar, and can identify them.

From this identification, we are able to make assumptions that are not given in the events themselves. For example, we know that a particular cloud formation means rain; we interpret a particular face expression as anger or surprise; we understand that a crowded bus will mean a missed train. All this – the prediction, the identification and the interpretation – is part of the final percept. The beginning of the process is an unidentified and uninterpreted ‘happening’, the impact of information from the world on our receptor systems. This unstructured raw material is what is generally called the stimulus, or the visual array, or the visual configuration.

A particular visual array may be interpreted as individual letters or as words, but not as both at the same time. This is one piece of evidence for the assertion that word identification does not necessary proceed through letter identification. For example, the same array of visual information can be allocated to different categories. It can be demonstrated with reading a number 760SS82 and the word ‘embossed’. The configuration ‘60SS’ is exactly the same in both cases. Even if it is pointed out, you still cannot read the ambiguous section in both ways at the same time. The way in which we perceive the word depends on the manner in which we categorise the incoming information, not simply on the characteristics of the incoming information itself.

Every aspect of reading can be seen as a process of categorisation.

The identification of letters involves allocating the incoming visual array – the marks on the page – into a set of 26 pre-established categories, each associated with the name of the letter of the alphabet.

The identification of words involves allocating the visual configuration to a much larger set of categories, each of which has the sound of the word as a name and also a number of related semantic connections or associations.

Reading for comprehension (=identification of meaning) involves the allocation of visual information to category structures that represent meaning to the reader. In every case, the same visual information is utilised, but it is allocated cognitively in a different way.

The explanation for the phenomena of (i) visual items being identified on minimal information; and of (ii) the same visual information being allocated to different categories on different occasions is as follows. The intake of visual information is supplemented by the additional information (i.e. redundancy) that the reader has already stored because of his previous experience and analysis of his language. This pre-acquired fund of knowledge is organised and stored in his long-term memory. I shall describe the process of visual identification as information passes through several levels of memory.