Word Recognition and Editing
Last week Robert Scoble posted an interesting article written by MS researcher Kevin Larson titled "The Science of Word Recognition".
What I found particularly interesting was that when we read, "Fixations never occur between words, and usually occur just to the left of the middle of a word."
This may explain a spelling error I made last night that I did not catch immediately upon proof reading.
I spelled the word "Fairfield" as "Farfield".
When reading, my eye seemed fixated on the "rf" part of the word first, thus eliminating most of what was before it. I also think that because the "i" is relatively close in shape to "r", the "i" appeared hidden, compared to "Faerfield"
It'd be interesting to know how many uncaught misspellings occur when the letters to the left of the fixation point are incorrect versus to the right of the fixation point. I'm sure that word length also is a factor.
The study also says that "that our perceptual span is roughly 15 letters ... we are using additional information further out to guide our reading."
I finally caught the misspelling only after I focused on the entire word of the text, without reading ahead.
Reading an entire document this way is quite dizzying, but it seems to be an effective way to catch spelling errors.