Thinking-related poll

[juliet]

Pete & I were discussing, among other things, reading this morning. So, a poll:

[Poll #330828]

I need a 'reading' icon.

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

When I say slowly, I mean compared to how fast I imagine the rest of you lot to read. Obviously it's probably fairly quick compared to the national average.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

I think your questions are slightly ambiguous. Or something. I mean, how fast I read text does not necessarily translate into how quickly I complete a book. Plus initially I thought "do you vocalise" meant "do you mumble along out loud?" rather than "do the words make noises in your head?". But anyway.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Read pretty fast, but I skim more than I'm entirely happy with. Some of it's laziness, and some of it's being too impatient to find out what happens.

[infinitarian.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure I have two styles of reading, where "vocalising" either happens or doesn't. The vocalising approach happens when the prose style's complex or difficult, or when it's particularly rich and I want to get full enjoyment out of it. The non-vocalising approach I use for assimilating simple factual stuff or reading a book primarily for the story rather than the style, and it's considerably quicker.

The choice between the two would appear to be unconscious, and I'm fairly sure I slip from one to the other as I'm reading. (Is that more information than you needed yet?)

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

How vocal the book is in my head depends on how distinctive the narrative voice is. It's absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to read the Lonely Londoners, say, without hearing voices. Something more recent that I found had a very distinctive voice is Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller. Obv, they're both first-person narratives, and that makes it a lot easier to 'hear the voices' because you're immersed right in it.

[dogrando.livejournal.com]

Is there any way of getting lj to show the correlation between the results of that poll? 'Cos that's the interesting thing, surely, rather than the number of people in each category.

[barakta]

I did my final year dissertation on cognitive style, which is a random psychology thing which basically looks into whether people think in words or pictures, and how they organise information in their brain as it were.

I found that there was interesting correlations between people's reading speed and how they handled information as well as whether they thought in words or pictures. I am hoping to do more research into this area when I have money/experience and of course funding.

I don't think in pictures, I don't usually find pictures helpful and i have to decode diagrams to make sense of them. I am very much a verbal person and think in words. I don't really subvocalise ever, in fact I loathe reading aloud as a concept not least cos it fouls up my speech something chronic (I am partially deaf and start sounding deaf when I read aloud).

I know many people who can read non-fiction quickly, or on a screen quickly, but struggle more with fiction or 'real books'. Like someone said above a correlation of this data would be cool, especially if you could get more data about participants lifestyles, experiences and occupations.

Argh, must not talk about research, have to do jobhunting not research.

Natalya