When we start reading a piece of text, how do our brains know to read it in such a way that accounts for both the upcoming punctuation and sentence structure that we haven’t gotten to yet?
In: Biology
Your brain is constantly predicting, like Google search complete. Each new word you read narrows down where the sentence is going to go.
Also, your eyes scan ahead a little.
An analogy: reading is like getting out of bed and going to the washroom in the dark in your own home. You mostly know where and how the task will play out, but you could be tripped up when things are not where you expect.
It might be helpful to compare it to another perspective. If you learn another language and you haven’t yet developed the fluency to predict the sentence structure, reading moves a lot slower, even if you know all of the words. You’re taking in each word as it comes and reading that sentence.
To continue the previous analogy, it’s like going to the washroom in the dark in someone’s house you don’t know at all. You go slowly and check constantly so you don’t trip.
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