Several months ago, I came upon an article called “Eyes and Ears Understand Differently.” Carnegie Mellon scientists found that the same information produces different brain activation when heard rather than read. The opposite is also true, of course. And I quote:

To the scientists' surprise, there were two big differences in the brain activity patterns while participants were reading or listening to identical sentences, even at the conceptual level of understanding the meaning of a sentence. First, during reading, the right hemisphere was not as active as anticipated, which opens the possibility that there were qualitative differences in the nature of the comprehension we experience in reading versus listening.

Second, while listening was taking place, there was more activation in the left-hemisphere brain region called the pars triangularis (the triangular section), a part of Broca's area that usually activates when there is language processing to be done or there is a requirement to maintain some verbal information in an active state (sometimes called verbal working memory). The greater amount of activation in Broca's area suggests that there is more semantic processing and working memory storage in listening comprehension than in reading.
Source: Science News

Oh, and there IS a "generic" American accent. It's what folks like Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, and all the other "national" tv talkers use. It's the accent the British actor who plays Dr. House had to learn. If I recall correctly, it comes from a certain part of the midwestern U.S.A. I have notes on it somewhere around here....

Benjamin:Per Greg's suggestion in response to Love Thy Anomie's questions (see below) a thread about reading. This perhaps seems somewhat simplistic but there's more to it than a first glance thought about it.

Suppose I have a computer program and it is able to take text and then derive from that text audible sounds which the hearer will hear as being the spoken language equivalent of that text. Would that be reading?

Is it possible to read something and not understand it? Or does reading entail understanding?

Love Thy Anomie's original questions:

"How do we classify reading exactly? Do I have to decode every grapheme to receive credit, or do I just have to understand the main argument, per wikipedia or sparknotes?"

I find it odd to see how this thread has developed but interesting as well. A couple of things I have in mind when thinking about 'reading'. The first, is it possible to 'read' a film for instance. I found myself recently 'watching' films on my computer, but several times successively. And as I go I find I am stopping frame and thinking before starting again. Then stopping frame and 'stepping' through the frames very slowly without audio just to get the nuances of the actors expressions. Is this watching or reading?
Second, I guess is the ways we actually read. I very rarely anymore start with the table of contents or 'page 1' of anything other than a novel read for the first time. I usually spend an amount of time on 'contents' which is usually a very general 'outline', then in the 'index' before I actually enter the 'body' of the book. When I do enter the body, I come from an angle suggested by the 'contents' or 'index' and begin reading. Sometimes the reading is a sentence or paragraph, sometimes several pages. Sometimes I am taken to the beginning of the chapter, sometimes to the beginning of the book, sometimes to the last page.
So, if I haven't read every page of the book consecutively have I read the book? What have I read?

Greg,
The film analogy you use is one my wife and I discuss quite frequently. When reading (decoding graphemes into sounds that are recognizable as meaning), the individual has a control of speed--a slo mo button, or rewind...in other words, the individual is processing at a speed that is idiosyncratic. It is truyly an individual experience. Even if two people share a book, they will read it differently--the individuals are the processors. In film, multiple individuals watch at the same time, at a speed dictated by the director.

Though, it's intersting the way that technology (the computer and DVD) is changing the way that the movie is read. While I've been slightly convinced that reading a text is quite deconstructionist (in that the reader becomes the writer of the text, enacting schema), I see the movie as a shared cultural experience. Through this example of Greg's, I'm starting to see how the film is occupying its own context.

The old context for film was the movie theater, then it was the home (VCR), and now its' the PC and Ipod. This progression looks a lot like it's moving towards individual contexts, or alienation.

My original questin about reading had more to do with reading as a "status symbol." For example, how does one prove they have read, and why should they prove this? The other question I was hinting at had to do with "deconstructionism." Who owns the rights to the "meaning" itself? Even if we credit the author, don't we build our own ideas through interaction with the text. I've always been curious about people who want other people to know they are well-read, as if this can be shown through a certificate (I recieved a certificate in the fourth grade from the local library, with gold foil stars).

I guess I was being sarcastic about the idea of "quantifying" reading. Can reading be quantified? Anybody who has read a journal article knows that often it is only the abstract that is necessary. But, depending upon the journal, the beauty may lie in the language of the writing itself, and the argument/claim may be of less importance than the novelty of language and ideas that are brought forward. I find myself getting lost in beautiful arguments and language. And, at other times, I just need the info itself.

I'm afraid that decoding has been mistaken for meaning-making, enhanced by the notion of Harry Potter as litteracy, or school textbooks as litteracy.

greg_en:
Is this watching or reading?

So, if I haven't read every page of the book consecutively have I read the book? What have I read?

I read movies all the time. They're called transcripts. If a movie is so light on dialog that much is lost in the process, I wouldn't have liked the movie anyway.

I asked a similar question in the literature forum. I said I read lots of starts of books or first halves of books, then put them down and go on to other books. Thinking mathematically I was asking if four half books counted for two whole ones.

A dick-wad said I had commitment issues and hadn't read anything. That's his answer.

Love Thy Anomie:

enhanced by the notion of Harry Potter as litteracy, or school textbooks as litteracy.

Did you misspell literacy for ironic effect?

If you can read Harry Potter and school texts, I'm afraid you're literate. You may not be very literate or extremely literate, but

Love Thy Anomie:
...."Who owns the rights to the "meaning" itself?...."

Nobody owns the rights to "meaning." Each person makes what meaning they will of a piece of literature. As an author myself, I well know that my audience gets some "meanings" from my work that I never intended.

Jebidiah:

unamused scuttled animist:

Jebidiah:

Benjamin:
Per Greg's suggestion in response to Love Thy Anomie's questions (see below) a thread about reading. This perhaps seems somewhat simplistic but there's more to it than a first glance thought about it.

Suppose I have a computer program and it is able to take text and then derive from that text audible sounds which the hearer will hear as being the spoken language equivalent of that text. Would that be reading?

Is it possible to read something and not understand it? Or does reading entail understanding?

Love Thy Anomie's original questions:

"How do we classify reading exactly? Do I have to decode every grapheme to receive credit, or do I just have to understand the main argument, per wikipedia or sparknotes?"

Computer programs that 'read' have a syntax but not a semantics. Are calculators adding? Or are they carrying out a set program? Are chess programs playing chess? Or have the moves been programed into the program already?

It would be very difficult to "read" without syntax but with semantics. Children frequently learn the phonetics or articulating words they do not understand: evancalous. If you need to look that up then you did not read it, by your argument. In a sense you are rejecting that the capacity to learn exists because you "start out ignorant" - which is what Socrates demonstrated to be untrue with a slave boy and geometry.

Um... you misunderstood. We have a semantics AND a syntax. Computers don't. They only have a syntax.

My point was that calculators aren't actually doing math, they're carrying out a program (syntax). Computers aren't actually reading, they're carrying out a program.

...which is a program to read.  Reading = ciphering, assigning a set of symbols to a set of predetermined equivalencies.  Translation.  It's reading.

What human beings do with that information is further translation (aka "meaning").  The purose of a machine is to translate information that is usable to a human being or set of human beings, and the human being(s) translate the information further.

Because the human being is the entity that is the end-user of the information, "meaning" is of service only to the end user--doesn't mean that the final translation of the information is of any different quality than any other of the previous stages of translation.

Qaab:

Love Thy Anomie:
...."Who owns the rights to the "meaning" itself?...."

Nobody owns the rights to "meaning." Each person makes what meaning they will of a piece of literature. As an author myself, I well know that my audience gets some "meanings" from my work that I never intended.

As long as your audience shares your time frame of reference, of "common usage".  I keep a library of dictionaries from different eras because definitions, meanings, do change with the changes in common usage over time.  Information processed by a machine has meaning only to the person or persons employing the machine in his/her service at the time the machine was employed for that purpose.

Qaab: Several months ago, I came upon an article called “Eyes and Ears Understand Differently.” Carnegie Mellon scientists found that the same information produces different brain activation when heard rather than read. The opposite is also true, of course. And I quote:

To the scientists' surprise, there were two big differences in the brain activity patterns while participants were reading or listening to identical sentences, even at the conceptual level of understanding the meaning of a sentence. First, during reading, the right hemisphere was not as active as anticipated, which opens the possibility that there were qualitative differences in the nature of the comprehension we experience in reading versus listening.

Second, while listening was taking place, there was more activation in the left-hemisphere brain region called the pars triangularis (the triangular section), a part of Broca's area that usually activates when there is language processing to be done or there is a requirement to maintain some verbal information in an active state (sometimes called verbal working memory). The greater amount of activation in Broca's area suggests that there is more semantic processing and working memory storage in listening comprehension than in reading.
Source: Science News

Oh, and there IS a "generic" American accent. It's what folks like Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, and all the other "national" tv talkers use. It's the accent the British actor who plays Dr. House had to learn. If I recall correctly, it comes from a certain part of the midwestern U.S.A. I have notes on it somewhere around here....

I do not believe you about the generic American accent. Hugh Laurie (House) has a terrible and unconvincing American accent. He sounds like me playing games of  advertising executives and presidents while drunk.  American "national" TV talkers tend towards an accent.  Amusingly, they strike me as having a wandering accent. It strains towards one direction and kicks back in the other. If that is "generic" then there is something seriously wrong with speech in America. Yet, the main reason for not believing you is that you have just described television which is, or seeks to be, a uniform and interchangeably coived medium.

I do believe that TV Talkers are presented as being "standard" or "received pronunciation" - which is exactly the project that the BBC carried out for decades under instruction of Lord Reith - former chairman of the BBC. He was ashamed of his accent and issued guidelines for pronunication. A kind of bare bones of utterance. It was, in part, this authoritarian approach to speech acts that George Orwell made fun of with "Newspeak" in 1984.

Now the BBC allows - and encourages - regional accents. The fundamental shift being a recognition that any utterance as text are as a multiple voice, not something generic.

For people with an American accent, say Southern or New England accent, who want to go into national public speaking careers, their goal is to lose the localized accent they grew up with. What do they aim for in their speech sounds then? The generic American pattern of speech, often said to be based on speech patterns of our midwest.

You are wrong about this, animist. You will absolutely NEVER hear a national news anchor say "cah" for "car" (New England accent) or "Y'all" for "you." There's a standard American dialect. There is.

Qaab: For people with an American accent, say Southern or New England accent, who want to go into national public speaking careers, their goal is to lose the localized accent they grew up with. What do they aim for in their speech sounds then? The generic American pattern of speech, often said to be based on speech patterns of our midwest.

You are wrong about this, animist. You will absolutely NEVER hear a national news anchor say "cah" for "car" (New England accent) or "Y'all" for "you." There's a standard American dialect. There is.

I hear some American broadcasters say "yoo" and others say "yew" and others say "yuh". There are patterns of speech, but a cadence is not the whole of an accent. Of course there is a standard American Accent. There is a Standard English accent (Recieved Pronunciation). The Geographically Mid West section is one of the most sparsely populated parts of the US. The idea of the "Mid-West" is nice, and, much like Lord Reith's idea of BBC English.

I see CSI:blah and hear such a variety of accents. Yes they are seeking to be the same - as though sounding the same makes a language, "speech in common" - but they are quite different to my ear. Things like attempting to lose the end of a word or the letter 'r' or thyming the letters o and a in some syllables but not others.

If you are right and there genuinely is no difference between the accents of national news anchors then it begs a question: why? Are they all from the same social background? What happened to opportunity?

Maybe I have listened to too many accents (Southern English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Egyptian, French, Polish, Shelta, American, Punjabi, Northern English) and now treat accent as being a delightful thing to be listened for and found. In which case I might be deluding myself about American. But I doubt it.

I'm pretty sure there is a youtube video for it, but I think you do not watch videos.