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Sources of redundancy






Redundancy exists whenever information is duplicated by more than one source. That is, there is redundancy whenever the same alternative can be eliminated in more than one way.

There are frequent occurrences of redundancy in reading. As an illustration, consider the unfinished sentence (which could appear at the bottom of a page of text): ‘ The captain ordered the mate to drop the an-…’ There are at least 4 ways of reducing our redundancy about the remainder of the sentence. They are 4 alternative and therefore redundant sources of information: visual, orthographic, syntactic and semantic (F. Smith, 1970).

- Visual alternative source. We could turn the page and see how the last word finished. That is what we normally mean by ‘reading’, and we can call this visual information.

- Orthographic (spelling) alternative source. We can also make some reasonable predictions without turning the page. We can say that the letter is unlikely to be b, f, h, j, m, p, q, r, w or z, because these letters just do not occur after an in common words of the English language. We can therefore attribute the elimination of these alternatives to orthographic information.

- Syntactic alternative source. There are also some things that can be said about the entire word before turning the page. We know that it is most likely to be an adjective or a noun because other types of words are most unlikely to follow the definite article the. The elimination of all these alternatives can be attributed to syntactic (or grammatical) information.

- Semantic alternative source. Finally, we can continue to eliminate alternatives even if we consider as candidates for the last word only nouns and adjectives, that begin with an- plus one of the letters not eliminated by the orthographic information already discussed. We can eliminate words like answer and anagram and antibody because our knowledge of the world tells us: these are not the kinds of things that captains normally order mates to drop. The elimination of these alternatives can be attributed to semantic information.

Obviously, the 4 alternative sources of information about the incomplete word in the above example to some extent provide overlapping information. We do not need as much visual information about the next word as we would if it occurred in isolation. That is so because the other sources of information eliminate many alternatives. Therefore, the 4 sources of information are all to some extent redundant. And the skilled reader, who can make use of the other 3 sources, needs much less visual information than the less skilled/fluent reader. That is why a skilled reader makes only 3-5 eye fixations on a line.

Distributional redundancy. Words as well as letters have distributional redundancy. Distributional redundancy is associated with the relative number of times each of the alternatives that constitute the uncertainty of a particular situation can occur. There’s nothing in psychology that is more firmly established experimentally than the fact that people need less visual information to identify more common words. It is particularly true in reading that the larger the context is, the greater is the redundancy. And the more redundancy there is, the less visual information a skilled reader requires. In passages of a continuous text, provided that the content is not too difficult for the reader, every other letter can be eliminated from most words; or about 1 word in 5 omitted altogether without making the passage too difficult for a reader to comprehend – provided that he has learned the rules related to letter and word occurrence and co-occurrence.






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