As a chinese user. This story is somewhat confusing to me. Because in my language system. Pronounce is the mapping of some Character combination that express certain meaning. Pronounce may be hugely different or completely unrelated in different area. But meaning of word is the same. So you are forced to link some image (a fixed group of characters) to meaning (there is no other way anyway). Does the technics in this article still applies? Or it's just different in different language?
I think a roughly comparable procedure in Chinese might be to take in only a few radicals, and guess the likely meaning of a character based on the surrounding context, rather than fully recognising each character individually.
The theory is that skilled readers do this unconsciously, blending various factors and using shortcuts rather than fully comprehending each character / word. It sounds very plausible - how else would skilled readers get so fast?
But in experimental tests, apparently skilled readers are very good at fully comprehending individual characters / words, without any context available. So it seems that if you don’t learn to do that, you won’t become a skilled reader.
> fully recognising each character individually.
> comprehending individual characters / words,
Weirdly enough, the elementary school here does taught both at same time. We have article reading in the test. Which don't really ask you recognize the characters down to the stroke. We also have "改錯字". Which roughly means "find the typo", but with a bit difference. The teacher may alter the character itself (add a stroke or remove a stroke) instead of replace it by some other characters. So you need to know how "exactly" should the character look like to pass the test.