They finally studied the method some of us use to read, here at a science news site:
Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists. The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain “sounds out” words each time we see them.
…Glezer and her co-authors tested word recognition in 12 volunteers using fMRI. They were able to see that words that are different, but sound the same, like “hare” and “hair” activate different neurons, akin to accessing different entries in a dictionary’s catalogue. “If the sounds of the word had influence in this part of the brain we would expect to see that they activate the same or similar neurons, but this was not the case, ‘hair’ and ‘hare’ looked just as different as “hair” and “soup”. This suggests that all we use is the visual information of a word and not the sounds.”
This builds on something we have known for some time, from a random source:
The term bouma is sometimes used in the work of cognitive psychology to mean the shape of a cluster of letters, often a whole word. It is a reduction of “Bouma-shape”, which was probably first used in Paul Saenger’s 1997 book Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, although Saenger himself attributes it to Insup & Maurice Martin Taylor.
I remember trying to explain this method of reading to my sixth-grade class and getting blank stares. Fun memory, come to think of it. It was an early introduction to how people give lip service to “intullekshual” ideas but tune out as soon as those ideas are not complimentary to the person speaking.