Why is it you can get understanding of someone’s face by moving your eyes over it left to right or right to left, but written English is only intelligible read left to right?

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Why is it you can get understanding of someone’s face by moving your eyes over it left to right or right to left, but written English is only intelligible read left to right?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

In concept any word could be understood read in either direction (in fact in practice they are often read as a single unit). The English language though is arranged such that some statements or descriptors are dependent on order. Multiple sentences often build upon each other.

For example: “John got up earlier than usual. He was unhappy about this.” Now if we read right to left we would first read a sentence that made little sense; who is “he”? Unhappy about what?

In contrast a face is just an object. The right half of the face holds not special order compared to the left, in concept they could be entirely independent.

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