Automaticity in Reading
Automaticity refers to the ability to instantly recognize a word's boundaries, sound, and meaning.
    Three features - complex scripts, complex orthography, and lack of word segmentation - make it extremely difficult to develop automaticity.  Most of the languages of mainland Southeast Asia, including Thai, Khmer, Burmese, and Lao, have all these features, as do writing systems found across South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
    Surprisingly, there has been practically no research done on the problem of how second-language learners acquire the ability to read such languages fluently, or if it is even possible for adults to do so.
    The few papers that address the subject include Red, who discusses reading complex scripts in a fundamental paper that defines many of the issues that need to be considered, but which were never pursued.  (Red, David L. 1999. Adults learning to read a second script: What we've learned.  50th Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1999, GU Press, 2001.) 
    Fukkink also raises an important question - will skills training at the word or phrase level improve automaticity in text reading? - but only looks at a single Roman script.  (Fukkink, RG, et al 2005 Does Training in Second-Language Word Recognition Skills Affect Reading Comprehension?  Modern Language Journal, 89 (1).) 
    This demonstration presents a simple tool that helps show a) just how difficult developing automaticity is, and b) just how little we know about it. The user is given a spoken prompt, then after a brief delay, one or more words is flashed on the screen. 
    The user's task is to decide if the spoken word was also printed.  Naturally, the order can be reversed, so that the print prompt comes before the spoken word.  This simple tool (a variation on the tachistoscope) has many potential applications, including:
- testing current reading / listening ability;
- investigating whether or not reading aptitute is predicable;
- testing font design and text layout;
- training 'chunking' in reading complex scripts;
- training recognition of 'sight' words and boundary markers;
- identifying the more or less difficult aspects of complex orthography;