By: Phys.org
May 13, 2019
About one in five people is considered to be low literate or illiterate, unable to read or write simple statements. Low literacy can be due to reading impairments such as dyslexia or little or no reading practice. For developing countries with low literacy rates, voice recognition has been hailed as a solution by companies such as Google. But is speech technology really the solution?
Falk Huettig and Martin Pickering argue that it is not. In an opinion article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the psycholinguists suggest that relying on speech technology might be counterproductive, as literacy has crucial benefits beyond reading. “It is very relevant and timely to look at the advantages of reading on speech, especially as people tend to read less and in different ways than they used to,” says Falk Huettig. “Contemporary social media writing and reading habits, for example, are quite different from traditional print media. Information that people used to get from written sources such as novels, newspapers, public notices, or even recipe books they get increasingly from YouTube videos, podcasts or audiobooks.”