The Science of Word Recognition

I came across this fascinating paper in cognitive psychology on how we recognize words. It is called "The Science of Word Recognition or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma". It is by Kevin Larson, a disgracefully young cognitive psychologist at Microsoft Research's Advanced Reading Technology Group. I highly recommend this paper, it was absolutely fascinating to even learn about the basics of the theories of word recognition. Apparently bouma means the shape of the word. One of the theories of word recognition says that we recognize words from their shape, and psychologists call this image the "bouma shape". This is however, not thought to be true anymore. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word’s component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word. In addition to perceptual information, we also use contextual information to help recognize words during ordinary reading, but that has no bearing on the word shape.

Anyways, I will let Kevin's paper do the talking.