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Re: Unusual reading phenomenon



Colleagues - I passed Carl Gaither's scrambled text to someone in our
Psych department who works on language. He noted that the link to
Cambridge is an urban legend. Of more importance, he responded to the
difficulty of reading math as follows:

"George,

It's an interesting question. The reason one is able to make sense
of the sentences has to do with the contextual cues provided by the
sentence structure and rules of grammar. I suppose the challenge in
physics and mathematics is to teach students to glean contextual cues
from the mathematical text. The difficulty is compounded by the
conceptual abstraction that occurs in mathematical reasoning. Language
can also involve conceptual abstraction, but I would argue that it is
qualitatively different than the symbolic abstraction that occurs in
mathematics.

It could also have something to do with the difficulty of
interpretation. There are enough cues in the scrambled text, that a
minimal amount of effort is needed to interpret it. In mathematical
texts, students are much more likely to skip over what they don't
understand because they have to invest more energy and effort into
figuring it out.

Anyway ... enough rambling ... back to work for me.

Mike

Dr. Michael T. McKay
Department of Psychology"

********************************************
"We are stuck with our universe, and
powerless to alter its fundamental constants."
- Heinz Pagels, 1985
********************************************

Dr. George Spagna
Chair, Physics Department
Randolph-Macon College
P.O. Box 5005
Ashland, VA 23005-5505

phone: (804) 752-7344
fax: (804) 752-4724
e-mail: gspagna@rmc.edu
http://faculty.rmc.edu/gspagna