Reading text is a relatively recent human activity, only having been around for about 5,000 years. Through text, writers are able to communicate with others at great distances. Readers are able to perceive arbitrarily determined shapes presented against some background and then form them into meaning. As the reader becomes more proficient at reading and uses reading in more and different ways, this process of interpreting letters and words becomes increasingly automatic.
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Thom Hudson (1998) studied this question.
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